


The Corner House

by Demia



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Ableist Language, F/F, Mental Health Issues, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Horror, Sibling Bonding, kind of, possible other relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-06-05 11:38:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 46,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6703159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demia/pseuds/Demia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>2006 had been a strange year for everyone in Poppytown. <br/>Ten years later, Kairi goes missing in the night and it's on Riku and Naminé's shoulders to find her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

#### 

Prologue

2006 had been a weird year, for Riku.  
For everyone, in the town, actually, but for Riku, Kairi and Naminé in particular.

In the month of March of the second year of elementary school, Kairi's older sister went missing, and for a while Riku's parents forbid him to go play with his best friend.   
As a seven-year-old boy, he hadn't had the means to understand why that was, and the only thing he had cared about was to go and find Aqua. 

All he had known, back then, was that, as long as Aqua was missing, Kairi would not be free to play with him. 

Riku wouldn't know what had happened to him that day, after he set out to go looking for Aqua.   
He knew that he had been found by his parents, they had cried, hugging him so tight that he had barely been able to breathe, and they had screamed at him to never, never leave again.   
He knew that his brother hadn't let him out of his sigh for months, after that day, and that eventually Kairi had started to come by the house again, so Riku – the seven-year-old child so selfish as to want to find a missing person just to have his best friend back, instead of having her happy – considered the situation as a victory for himself. 

*

In the month of August of the same year, Riku's brother stopped talking.   
When the adults whispered between themselves, ignoring Riku leaning against the doors and the walls and hiding in the shadows keeping his breath inside his lips not to be heard and discovered, they said it was post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Riku, as a seven-year-old boy who barely paid attention in school, whose only care in the world was playing with Kairi and Naminé in the poppy fields of their town and stuffing his pockets with cookie crumbs to give the pigeons, didn't know anything about traumas, let alone the problems derivative from those and since he was still just as selfish as he had been in March, he tried to find a cure for whatever was hurting Terra, because he wanted his brother back. 

*

Of the beginnings of September he had no memory at all.   
All he knew was that people came around the house, later in the fall, to say hello to him and ask question.   
Riku never answered those. He never could.   
He didn't remember the things those people were talking about. 

*

In October, Naminé's older brother fell asleep and he never woke up.   
Naminé never stopped playing with them, and Riku never did anything for her, to have her near him.   
The adults hadn't tried to take them apart, not that time, not again, and so he had to see Naminé crying all the time.   
He had to see her staring into the void, sat on the grass with her legs bent tightly against her chest.   
He had to talk to Kairi about her worries, even if he had never felt any worry for Naminé at all. 

He didn't understand what was happening, then.   
If he had, he would have cared more. 

*

In December of 2006, Naminé's twin brothers disappeared. 

Men dressed in blue started to show up at the house at any hour of the day, they roamed the streets, they wanted to speak with his parents, with his brother, with Kairi's and Naminé's families. What remained of those. 

For a while, Riku hadn't stayed in his home.   
The men dressed in blue brought him and Kairi and Naminé to an old woman living outside of Poppytown and they told them to be good.   
The men told them that if they were good – very good – they would see their families soon enough. 

Riku hadn't believed them.   
Riku hadn't had a reason not to trust them. They had upset his family, his brother, his friends. 

*

In the year 2006, the nights had been long, the days eerie, the words Riku had spoken had never been kind.   
He hadn't been the best of children, always thinking about himself first, no clear idea of what real friendship was about.   
The year 2006 had been a mystery he would always prefer leaving in the past. 

The day they celebrated the end of the year, Riku and Kairi and Naminé were still living with the old woman. She had been kind, to them, and understanding of their weird behavior, their detachment, their coldness.   
They had been away from their families for a while.   
They received daily phone calls from their parents, and Riku from Terra, because, amongst them, he was the only one with a brother, still.   
Even if Terra was different. Had been since March, maybe, or maybe since August, but Riku still had him. He was still awake, still there, he had also started to talk again, albeit much less than usual. 

The last day of the year 2006 had smelled like freedom.   
Like tears and pain and confusion.   
Like poppies and wet soil, like mud and mold on old walls. 

*

“Don't you think it's weird?” Kairi asked that night, after all of them had laid down under the covers, their three beds cramming a small room, slim walls doing nothing to block their words from reaching the old woman's ears.   
But Kairi was whispering and she was a good whisperer and no one ever heard her when she didn't want to be heard. 

“What?” Naminé asked, and even Riku could feel the cold coming from her. Naminé had stopped crying, but she had stopped smiling too. 

“That we don't even know her name,” Kairi said, “they never told us her name.”

“It's because we won't stay here forever,” Riku told her, trying to make his voice as small as possible. He wasn't as good at whispering as his friends were. 

“But we will stay here for long, right?” Kairi asked, and even if it was dark, Riku knew she was biting her lower lip and her eyes were teary.   
She wasn't the only one who wanted to go back home. 

“Not if we don't want to,” Naminé murmured. 

Riku had never been as scared of her as he had been that night. 

*

The year 2006 ended with three kids running away in the night, and an old woman worrying herself to death.


	2. Chapter One

#### 

Chapter One

“You should have come to the art show,” Kairi bitched, puffing out breath to try and get her hair away from her eyes. What she didn't consider was that the strand that was bothering her was glued to her damp forehead and that it wouldn't allow itself to be swayed by a puny sigh. “It was beautiful.”

“Sure. There is nothing I want more in life than listening to you and Olette gushing about your date-friends,” Riku deadpanned. The August air was killing him. So far out in the poppy fields, it was too humid to even breathe and he wondered, again, for the billionth time, why he had thought it was a good idea to follow Kairi out there. “You should know me better than that.”

“Asshole,” Kairi said, jogging up to him and punching him in the shoulder. Riku laughed at her short breath despite the fact that he was feeling just as bad as she was. “Naminé's paintings were amazing,” she murmured, laying against his chest and puffing upwards again, glaring at her hair like that would help in any way. Riku took pity of her and pushed the strand out of the way, putting it behind her ear. “She would have loved it if you had come.”

“She can go fuck herself, for all that I care,” Riku spat out, munching on the inside of his cheek, fighting down the desire to ask anything about Naminé. If she was doing okay, if she ever said his name in casual conversation, if she still thought of him, sometimes.

“Childish,” Kairi commented, putting on an expression worthy of an Oscar. He was always amazed by her theater-kid soul. Mostly because she had never attended a theater class in her entire life. “It's been three years. Don't you think it's time to forgive and forget? Bury the shovel? Move on?”

“The hatchet, Kairi,” Riku corrected her, chuckling a little. “You bury the hatchet.”

“Same difference. They're both things you use to kill people.”

“Do you even know what a shovel is?” Riku asked, frowning a little. “Because I assure you that you don't use it to kill people. You use it to bury people you have killed.”

“ _Same difference,_ ” Kairi repeated, slower this time. 

The poppy fields surrounded them, stretching so far out that Riku couldn't even see the town, from where they stood.   
He didn't remember what excuse Kairi had given him, to drag him so far out – if she had even given him one at all – but he was there, now, and he had to wonder if she was going to kill him and bury him with a shovel, after all.  
From Kairi, he had learned to expect and be ready for anything and everything.  
A pity, that she was his only friend. He could definitely do with someone normal in his already absurd life. 

“Now can I know why you brought me here?” he asked, side-eying her. She had a mischievous smile planted on her shiny lips that Riku didn't like at all. 

“Nope. It's a surprise.” She got on her tiptoes to smack a kiss on his cheek and Riku sighed even before her lips smashed against his skin. He knew he was going to sport the marks of her bright lilac lipstick all day. “Come on, move or we will never get there in time.”

*

Riku should have expected something like that.

“Tah-dah!” Kairi exclaimed, hands dancing in the air, her theater soul making an appearance again. She smirked wide and bright. So smug and proud of herself.

Riku should have expected it because he knew that Kairi was evil. There was no denying it. She was the worst brand of evil around. With her _surprises_ and her _relax_ and her _come ons_. Riku should have never trusted her to begin with. 

“Why do you do this to me?” he whined, turning his head to look at her. 

“You don't ever want to do anything fun with me,” she singsonged, “we're supposed to be best friends, Riku.”

“Yes, but this is too much,” he mumbled, looking, dejected, towards the makeshift banners dangling over the entrance to the Corner House.   
He didn't even like the Corner House.   
It was creepy and old and it reminded him of things he didn't want to be reminded of. 

“You won't come to the art show, the art show will come to you.”

“I literally just walked here.”   
Kairi raised an eyebrow at him and placed a fist on her cocked hip. 

“You spoil this, I spoil your face,” she said, smiling so wide that her perfect white teeth were showing. 

“You wouldn't dare.” Riku stared her down, taking advantage of his six-and-a-half-inches-taller stature. “My face is too beautiful. It would be a crime.”

“I will go to jail, then,” Kairi said, shrugging, “it's not like I hadn't planned on ending my life behind bars, anyway.”  
And despite the fact that Riku knew it was a joke, he still felt his stomach turn upside down. 

“Say hello to my brother once you're there,” he muttered. For some reasons, he still pretended, even in front of Kairi, that the fact that Terra was in jail didn't bother him. He still pretended he had no regards about joking about it.   
He still pretended he didn't care. 

“Lighten up, will you?” Kairi said, shaking her head and punching him again. It was a miracle he didn't have a permanent, fist-shaped bruise on his arm. “He will come home in three months. It's not long.”

Yeah, three months.   
It wasn't a long time.   
Not compared to the ten years he had had to wait to see his brother again. 

“Now come on!” Kairi gripped his forearm and started pulling on it, growling for him to move without saying any word at all. “They're waiting for us!”

Riku almost wanted to ask who _they_ were.   
He stared at the Corner House, letting shivers run down his spine, playing with his vertebra, breathing on his nape.   
If there were inhuman _they_ in the House, he preferred not to know at all.

*

Naminé wasn't there.   
Her paintings were exposed in the atrium, in the only bright spot still visible, now that everyone else but he and Kairi had left, and they were breathtakingly beautiful. Just like Naminé herself was. 

“That's called Riku the Asshole,” Kairi informed him, snickering.   
It was a piece so finely painted that Riku could almost cry.   
A house, antique and small and abandoned, a messy garden all around it, grass overgrown, flowers wild, deep red, red like blood.   
And in the middle, there were the three of them. Smaller, scared, alone.   
A shadow at their back, too big to be human, and a man in blue in the corner of the canvas. 

“No it's not,” he retorted. Olette had said it was called _New Year's Night, 2006_ , but she hadn't needed to tell him that. Riku already knew what that painting was. He remembered the house, the shadows, the policemen that had taken them from their homes and brought them to the old woman. 

He remembered almost all of 2006.   
The year his brother had been arrested.   
The year Aqua and Sora and Roxas disappeared.   
The year Ventus had fallen asleep. 

“You were an asshole, though. Even then,” Kairi murmured, her cheeks puffed out. She was standing next to him, so close that her body-heat was suffocating him, so close that he could almost hear her every heartbeat. “Selfish and–” she cut herself off, eyes fixed on a corner of the atrium. 

Riku thought again that if she was seeing someone that shouldn't have been there, he would rather prefer not knowing it.  
He wasn't cool with preternatural shit.   
He really wasn't. 

But then, Kairi shook her head and turned to look at him, a half question formed on her lips. 

“I was a child, yes,” Riku said, interrupting whatever she might have said. He didn't care for creepy questions or anything of the kind.   
He wouldn't sleep for years if Kairi ever told him she had seen something or heard something weird in the Corner House. “And an asshole. I grew out of it.”

“You really didn't,” Kairi said, chuckling, “you always spoil everyone's fun.” 

“Fun is not everything.”

“For seventeen-year-old people it is.”

“You're not seventeen, yet,” he reminded her, poking her in the cheek and smiling down at her. 

“Told you you're an asshole.” Kairi bopped his nose and laughed at his scrunched up face. 

*

Late night was the best time to be awake, in the middle of August in Poppytown. It was the only time air deigned to blow.   
The soft wind was still hot, of course, because the town was awful and the diurnal temperature range was nonexistent, but it was better than the non-breathable, still, water-like air of the day. 

As it was, that night Riku would have loved to be asleep. 

“I thought you deleted my number,” he hissed into the phone, almost crushing it in his hand, so hard he was gripping it. 

“ _Hello to you too._ ” Naminé sounded just as bored and cold as ever, but Riku had known her too well – still knew her too well – to be sidetracked by her tone. “ _Kairi said she has seen a girl today. In the Corner House._ ” 

“Don't fuck with me, Naminé!” Riku screeched, wondering if it was wise to just hang up and ignore whatever subsequent call would come. Because there would be a lot of subsequent calls. Naminé hated being hung up on.   
His body was being molested by shivers, no matter how fricking hot it was, and he had to look behind his back, no matter that there was only wall there. He had to see it for himself.

“ _Fucking with you wouldn't be fun, Riku,_ ” she said. “ _I just want to know if you have seen someone too._ ”

“There was no one there. Except for us,” he said, his voice trembling in his throat, words shaking and weak. He didn't want to betray Kairi.  
He didn't want to be a snitch, to sell her out.   
But at the same time he didn't want to ignore the symptoms.   
If she was getting bad again, it was his duty too, as her best friend, to make sure that she would get all the help she needed. “You think…”

“ _I won't discuss this with you,_ ” Naminé cut him off. The line went silent, but still alive, none of them sure if there was something there could be done, something that could be said, to make everything good again. To take them back to when they had been friends.   
The only reason they still talked sometimes, was for Kairi.   
Kairi hated seeing them apart. “ _Goodnight, Riku._ ”

“Wait!” he blurted out, his breath short, the inside of his cheek bleeding and mauled. Eating would hurt for a few days, but he was used to that. “Tell her thanks for me?” he asked Naminé, knowing well enough that Kairi was sleeping right beside her, in her room, where once upon a time also Riku would have been. “For today.”

“ _Okay,_ ” Naminé said, and she dropped the call. Riku stood still, sat on his bed, listening to the hypnotic sound of the free line.   
And he thought of things he would have much rather preferred leaving in the past. Things that the past was pushing upon all three of them. 

Kairi used to see things all the time.   
She saw Aqua, most of all. She saw her in her room, doing the things she would usually do, getting ready for school, throwing on her jersey before a tournament, standing on the benches outside, next to the field, during lunch breaks, sipping from a bottle of water. 

But Kairi used to see other things too.   
Shadows and monsters in the corners of rooms, people with no faces, no names, no bodies.   
She used to see things that scared her, things she had thought were real. 

And Riku had thought they had been real too.   
He still thought they were. 

Only because Kairi had stopped seeing them after starting to take her pills, that didn't mean the things hadn't been there. 

*

“Is your dad home?” Kairi asked him, swinging her feet down the roof. Riku was terrified of the possibility she could lose her balance and fall to the hard concrete under them.

“At work,” he said, wrapping an arm around her waist and gripping tightly. She huffed at him, just about ready to start scolding him on his worrier tendencies, but in the end she simply let herself rest her head against his shoulder. 

“Nami called you, didn't she?”

“Of course she did,” Riku said, “she wanted to know if… You know.”

“If I'm getting bad again, yeah. You're all so worried about that.”  
  
“Excuse us while we care for you,” Riku deadpanned, nudging her in the side, but not hard enough to make her squirm. It wouldn't do to make her jump and screech and fidget. It was like begging her to fall down the roof, and Riku wanted the exact opposite of that. 

“No, no. You _worry_. It's not the same,” Kairi snapped, pouting her lips and slumping her shoulders. 

“Oh, sure. It's the same between a shovel and a hatchet but it's not when we care for you.”

“Damn right,” she said, nodding to emphasize the concept. After a moment of silence, she added, in a small voice, “I don't want to take meds again.” 

Riku hummed under his breath, turning his head to place his lips against her temple, her damp hair. It smelled like coconut shampoo. 

“But you felt better after taking them,” he reminded her. 

“No. I felt tired all the time and they fucked up my sleep schedule.”

“Kai, please,” he whispered, holding her even tighter, “we want you to be okay.” 

“You want me to be _normal_ , but I'm not,” she said, worrying her lower lip with her teeth, peeling away the scabs of previous cuts, uncaring of the blood-drops felling on her chin. “I can't be like you, Riks,” she said, eyes wide and scared, maybe of rejection, maybe because the time she had been taking her meds hadn't been a good time for any of them.

Riku hadn't been having a good time since the fourteenth day of March, when Aqua had been declared missing. 

That event had marked his life permanently. That had been point number one of the myriad of things that had gone wrong in Riku's weird existence. 

“Who cares about normal?” he snapped, “I just want you to feel good.”

Kairi chuckled. “That sounded weird. Are you proposing to take me to bed?”

“What? No!” Riku exclaimed, feeling his cheeks warm up in embarrassment. That was so Kairi-like, to change the subject ad soon as it became too deep, too serious.   
Sometimes, Riku wanted a friend ho could dive into the deeper, darker, more serious thoughts. And then he remembered why Kairi wouldn't and he shut those kind of thoughts off. He shut them up. 

Kairi had every reason to demand lightness in her life, who was he to deny it to her? 

“I wouldn't have refused,” she teased him, a mirthful grin on her lips. 

“Kairi, stop! What about Naminé?” 

“She would join us, of course,” she said, puffing out her chest and placing a hand on her heart, faking a scandalized expression. “I'm no cheater.” 

“This is weird,” Riku lamented. “I don't want to talk with you about this.”

“It could be fun, though. I've never did the do with a boy.”

“Yeah, because you have a girlfriend,” Riku reminded her. 

“That doesn't mean anything.” Kairi waved her hand in front of his face and he battled it away, gently. 

“Like hell it doesn't,” Riku muttered, more to himself than to her. Kairi was laughing at him without sound, and he forced himself to ignore her. “You two have been together since forever.”

*

Another night, another waste of a good mental place.   
Those who said Riku had got out of 2006 unscathed were idiots, because he had the mighty need to constantly check behind his back, afraid of finding men dressed in blue breathing on his neck, afraid to see the old woman finally catching up to them, in the night, running on her old, unstable legs, shaking her walking rod in the air, ready to snatch them up and take them back to the house. 

He still wondered, whenever left alone with his thoughts too long, if Terra had committed those crimes the police accused him of, arrested him for.   
He still doubted his own brother's innocence, even if it was wrong, and he felt like a dirty betrayer of his blood.   
A traitor to his family. 

And if Terra really was a murderer and a criminal?   
Would Riku ever feel safe in his home, once his brother got out of prison?   
Would Riku still love him?

His phone rang, disturbing the quiet of the night, making him jump out of his skin.   
The screen was flashing, ' _Dad_ ' was written in black, small letters, and Riku sighed, accepting the call, putting it on speakers. 

“Hi,” he said, trying to muster up as much cheeriness as he could. 

“Hello, Riku,” his father responded, sounding tired and anguished.   
It was one of those nights. The drive back from the prison was long and wearing on his father's already tired mind. “I found a motel. I'm staying here for the night, if you don't mind.” 

“It's fine,” Riku reassured the man, keeping in a sigh that was pushing against his lips harder than all his siblings. “I'm gonna call Kairi, see if she wants to spend the night,” he said, lied.   
Kairi was at Naminé's, as usual.   
They always spent the nights together, too damn scared to sleep alone.   
Riku used to stay with them, too, before the fight that tore him apart from Naminé.   
Before everything fell down to pieces. 

Kairi had said she had seen a girl, in the Corner House.   
Or so Naminé had told him.   
Riku wasn't sure he wanted to have Kairi in his home at night, honestly. If she were to tell him she was seeing someone in his room, for example, he would categorically refuse to ever sleep there ever again.   
Maybe it was delusions, maybe it was post-traumatic stress disorder – the same thing that had afflicted Terra ten years prior, _exactly_ ten years, during the August of 2006 – or maybe it was schizophrenia; whatever it was that caused Kairi to see things and people that shouldn't have been seen, that weren't there, he still believed her. 

“That would be nice,” his father said, his voice wavering, and Riku didn't know if it was because it was a prison night or if the signal was failing them. It wouldn't have been the first time for either of those options. “I don't like knowing you there all alone.” 

“Yeah. I don't like to be here all alone either,” he said, throwing in a small chuckle just to make his dad feel better.   
The man needed it, most of the times.  
More over so now that mom wasn't with them anymore. Now that there was no one to take care of his father and his problems.


	3. Chapter Two

#### 

Chapter Two

Kairi's house was small and comfortable. The kind of house that felt like a home to everyone entering it.   
Riku liked Kairi's house. He had known it for years, and the furniture was a friend of his, the walls his protector. 

“… So I told her she could kiss my ass and she started crying. Hence my bruised eye,” Kairi was saying, the phone held miraculously between her shoulder and ear while her hands were busy rearranging notes on the desk in her room.

“Yes, I know, Nami,” she drawled, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. She then stared at Riku with a smirk so satisfied that Riku couldn't help but chuckle at her. “No, Nami.” The pause lasted longer, this time, and Riku waited patiently for the scolding to stop. “What could I have done? She was pissing me– Yes, Nami, I know!”

“At least it wasn't a broken nose,” Riku whispered, sitting down on Kairi's bed and starting to take out his books and notes.   
He wondered why Kairi had invited him, if she had planned to spend the entire time getting lectured by her girlfriend.  
Riku had a lot of things more interesting to do with his free time.   
Okay, maybe that was a lie. 

“Exactly!” Kairi exclaimed, wincing a moment later, when Naminé undoubtedly reprimanded her for not paying enough attention. “Sorry, sorry. I know– Ye–Yes, yes, I know, Nami– Yeah, sorry about tha– Yeah, Nami–” Kairi sighed and threw herself on top of Riku, causing him to fall on his back. Well, he should have expected that. “Listen, I have to go,” she said into the phone, her voice a little bit more biting, a little bit more serious, a little bit angrier. “I have a _faux_ -test coming next week and Riks is over here, helping me study for it. You know how my dad is.” She started playing with a strand of her hair, twining it between her fingers, nodding along something Naminé was saying. 

As the phone connected with the mattress, Riku asked, “Isn't you girlfriend a little bit overwhelming?”

“Shush,” Kairi said, covering his mouth with both her hands and staring into his eyes. “Nami is perfect.”  
Riku nodded, rolling his eyes. He wondered how she would react if he were to bite her fingers. If she would yelp and punch him or simply laugh it off. 

*

“I was thinking,” Riku said, discarding his notebook on the pillow next to him for a moment. It wasn't as if continuing to stare at it would make his math homework become easier.

“Weird,” Kairi commented, head buried in her history book, legs crossed on her bed. It was funny how they abandoned the desk after the first ten minutes of work and ended up every study day with atrocious backaches. 

“Oh, sure! Me thinking is weird but you talking about a threesome could be fun.”

“Yeah, no. Stop talking about the threesome. It was a bad idea. You and Nami would have angry sex and I would feel left out,” Kairi lamented, shooting him a look that Riku couldn't decipher. “What were you thinking about?”

“It's been ten years,” Riku said, teeth perforating the flesh inside his cheek. As usual. There was nothing weird about it, but there was plenty weird about the expression on Kairi's face. 

“No, Riku,” she said in the same tone she would have used to scold a bad dog. She also pointed a finger at him, staring down on him from her sitting position. “Whatever you're planning is no.”

“I'm not–”

“No!” she interrupted him, shaking her head. Riku huffed, glaring at her. 

“I'm not planning anything! I was just thinking it's been ten years. That's all. The thought stopped there!”

“Why would you even think about that at all?” Kairi snapped, her book falling closed on her lap, her arms coming to hug her torso, her shoulders hunched down even more, and on her face the purest shade of betrayal. 

“I don't know Kairi,” he drawled out, “maybe because it was a pretty important part of my life.”

“ _Our_ life,” she said. “We were there, too.”

“And so the reason I was telling you,” he muttered, halfway to angry, completely bitter. “If you listened, sometimes, instead of jumping to conclusions, it would be really great.”

“I rest my case once again, Riks. You're an asshole.”

“Right back at you.”

“Wow, you're so mature!” she exclaimed, touching her chest with only the tips of her fingers, fluttering her eyelids, lips parted in pretend shock. 

“Whatever,” he spat out. Kairi was the best at pissing him off, had always been. But she was also the best at cheering him up, the best listener, the best friend he had ever had.   
Fighting with her for the smallest thing was nothing new, anyway. 

Kairi's father popped his head in the room right in that moment, cutting off his daughter's retort, whatever that was, and waved at them. “Are you staying for dinner, Riku?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” he answered, glancing at his phone screen. It wasn't late, yet, but in an hour or so he would have to go home. His dad was coming back. “I promised to be back for dinner.”

“Okay, well, say hello to your dad for me.” The man smiled at him. He had the same smile of Kairi's, even if they were not related by blood. 

“Will do,” Riku told him, reciprocating the smile with a little one of his own. 

“I think my dad likes you more than he likes me,” Kairi said as soon as the man left the room, closing the door behind himself. 

“He would be the only one,” Riku joked. Not that it wasn't real, though. 

“Well, Nami liked you more than she liked me, before you fought.”

“That's bullshit,” Riku said. He would have told her to get her head checked, but that would have been cruel. So much crueler than he was willing to be.   
And then he thought, _Kairi said she had seen a girl in the Corner House_.   
In the Corner House.   
The one out in the poppy fields.   
The one they never talked about, even if they went there, sometimes.   
The one they should have avoided like death, because it was nothing but trouble. Because it held the worst memories, the worst possibilities. 

“She did! I have proof,” Kairi went on, slamming her hands on the mattress, making the bed creak under them. 

“Yeah, maybe five years ago,” Riku mumbled, his mind focused on the Corner House and only that, because it was a fixed thought, no matter how much he tried to pry it away from his head. It was always there, always hunting him, haunting him.

*

The thing with the Corner House was: nobody had ever lived there.   
Riku's family wasn't originally from Poppytown, his father had moved there when Riku's mom had been pregnant with Terra. And by then, the house was already abandoned.   
Kairi's father had told him once, when Riku had subtly – not subtly at all, actually, but he had tried his best – to inquire about it, that it was already like that when he had been a child, and that no one really knew who had lived there, or when had been the last time the house had been inhabited. 

If Riku had seen someone live there, he would probably feel less scared of it. 

“The night went well?” his father asked, sitting down at the table, carrying a pot of whatever he had prepared for dinner. Riku didn't care about food. He wasn't even angry, so focused he was on the Corner House and on the fact that it was 2016 and that Terra would finally – _finally_ – come back home.   
Only three months left.   
Three months and he would see his brother again. 

He thought of Kairi. Kairi that would never see Aqua again, not unless her delusions started acting up again and she effectively refused to take her medication.   
He thought of Naminé, that had lost her twins, that had lost Ventus even if she could see him every time she wished to. 

And he thought of the Corner House, who he was sure was cursed and had robbed the three of them of their families. 

“Yes. Kairi spent the night. We had fun,” he lied, accepting the plate his father passed him. “How's Terra?” 

His father looked at him for a moment, silent, thoughtful.   
It was true that Riku rarely asked about his brother, but it was also true that he loved Terra with all his heart. That he had been the number one supporter of his brother's innocence, even after his father had started to doubt it. 

“He's… Impatient to come back home,” his father said, slowly, looking way too hard into his plate, discomfort written all over his body like a shining warning to drop the subject.   
Riku knew it wasn't easy for his dad. It wasn't easy for anyone involved.   
He didn't want to force the conversation along, to make his father mad, or sad or upset in any way, but still, he loved his brother. He wanted to know if Terra was okay, he wanted to know if he was talking or if he had reverted back to how he had been ten years before. 

He was impatient too, and at the same time afraid like he had never been, because prison changed people and he knew that the others in the village would probably not accept Terra back in their graces, not after ten years, not after the memory was still so raw and close. 

Riku thought often that, maybe, demolishing the Corner House would do good for the town and the people alike. It was a reminder too grim, too dark, and it held no other purpose than to hurt whomever got too close to it. 

Kairi said she had seen a girl, there.   
Riku had wanted to ask, ever since Naminé had told him, if the girl had held any resemblance to Aqua at all. If Kairi was slowly descending into madness again because it was the tenth anniversary of that fateful year, if it was because she was breaking under the pressure, if it was because they were never free of the memories. 

Wherever they went, people stared at them, whispering behind their back if they would end up like their older siblings, wondering if Riku would end up in jail, too, if Kairi would disappear, murdered by a jealous lover, if Naminé would simply stop being there, never to be heard of again. 

The townspeople had no mercy on them. No mercy at all.   
They were cruel beasts, monsters hunting for blood in form of news, clawing at them with their murmured questions, their off-handed comments, their words no softer than any bullet, any blade. 

“It's only three month,” Riku said, and his father flinched. The man had probably hoped the words wouldn't come, the reminder that soon he would have to cohabit with Terra again, with the son he had turned his back to, the son he had called – _believed_ – guilty. 

Riku didn't blame his father.  
He didn't.   
But he didn't even hold him as high as he would have if his father had supported Terra through it all. 

*

The twenty-first of every month, Riku went to the hospital.   
Before the fight with Naminé, it had been the twentieth. The three of them would march inside the doors, walking the corridors with their back straight and their head held high, shouldering the weight of the stares without a trace of fear in their stances, in their eyes; their hands intertwined like vines, an unbreakable connection with the only purpose of strengthening them.

But nowadays, Riku and Naminé didn't talk anymore. They weren't friends. They probably couldn't endure one another's presence for too long a time, and so, Riku would leave Naminé and Kairi the twentieth day of every month and give himself the twenty-first. 

He would still march inside with his head held high, ignoring the people, the slashing words, the heated stares.   
It was difficult, but it was to be done anyway.   
He had to bear with it, to let everyone see that their judgment would never stop him from doing what he felt was right. 

Room one-eight-four was empty, bar from its inhabitant. Silent and still as always, immutable even if still growing up. Growing old. 

The first time Riku had seen Ventus asleep, he had been ten years old and Ventus had been nineteen.   
After eight years of constantly visiting, all months, punctual like a clock, Riku could see every trace of growth in the man laid out on the bed in front of him. 

He had not known Ventus very well, but what he had seen of him he had always liked.   
Ventus had been a kind boy, unfailing gentle with the seven-year-old him, giving him candy and patting his head whenever he had come by the house to collect Terra for one of their adventures. 

Town's teenagers were big on adventures. Or had been, before 2006 had happened. 

“Good morning,” he said to Ventus. It had been too many years of doing the same thing over and over, for Riku to be self-conscious about talking with an unresponsive man. And who knew? Maybe Ventus could actually hear everything that went on in the world around him, and maybe he was comforted by their voices and maybe, if he ever woke up, he would also be happy to answer their questions, their greetings, their one-sided conversations. “I don't know if the girls already told you, but Terra is coming home in three months.”

He sincerely doubted Kairi and Naminé had talked about Terra at all, considering how Naminé thought of Riku's brother. 

“Dad says Ter is impatient to be back. I'll be sure to tell him to come and say hello to you. I know you probably miss him. You were always next to him, when you were younger,” Riku muttered, taking a seat in the plastic chair the nurses always left in the room. There had been a time, a few years before, when the room one-eight-four had never been empty of visitors.   
Ventus' parents had always been there, constantly praying for their boy to wake up, to come back.   
They had had to stop, though. Their lives and their jobs getting in the way. 

Riku thought that maybe, being in a coma was better. Maybe waking up to his brothers missing, and one of his best friends dead and the other blamed for said death wasn't something Ventus wanted. Maybe the coma was a subconscious last resort of his brain to keep the grim reality away. 

Maybe Ventus was dreaming of a better world for all of them.   
One where Aqua was alive and Kairi wasn't seeing things that didn't exist, one where Roxas and Sora had had the chance to grow up alongside all of them. One where Terra had never been incarcerated for a crime he hadn't committed. 

“We still have some photos of that time, you know? You were happy,” he said, his throat closed off, burning.   
That photo had been taking in the backyard of his house. Terra had had too long hair and Aqua was kissing his cheek as the camera snapped a picture of them. Ventus in between their bodies, shorter and smaller and smiling as bright as no sixteen-years-old boy ever should have. “We were all happier, then.”

Riku didn't remember much of his life, before the terrible 2006 had happened, but he remembered a simplicity and an easiness that just wasn't there anymore.   
He could never have that anymore. It was gone. Forever. 

*

Kairi's adoptive mom was a beautiful lady.   
Riku sometimes still bumped into her on the streets, and she was always kind to him, always smiling, placing her hand on his cheek and gushing about how much he had grown up, how handsome he had become, how she remembered him when he was but a baby, even before he had learned how to walk. 

She was a beautiful lady, and even if she had divorced her husband after Aqua's disappearance, after everything that had happened, she still loved all of them.   
She wasn't like Riku's mom. Kairi's adoptive mother hadn't left Poppytown, abandoning her child and her family to run after an easier life with zero complications.

“Were you at the hospital?” Naoki asked him, gripping his arm delicately. She was soft-spoken, Riku had never heard her raise her voice in all his seventeen years of life, and he and Naminé had always joked about how Kairi had learned how to whisper from her. 

“Yes,” he answered. Weirdly enough, he was one-hundred percent comfortable in the presence of Naoki. She was possibly the only adult person he had no problem with whatsoever. She put him at ease in a way precluded to everyone else over the age of thirty. Or maybe Riku had a problem with perceived authority – as his therapist used to say – and Naoki didn't give out authoritative vibes of any kind.   
Riku didn't believe much in therapists. His own therapist even less.

“Such a good boy,” Naoki cooed. “I've heard that Terra is coming home soon, right? I'm sure you can't wait to see him again.” 

“Yes. Three months to go.” Riku nodded, a smile blooming on his lips, uncharacteristic as it was. It was very probably impossible not to smile when Naoki was talking to you. She had the gift to make people happier just by speaking to them. “I really can't wait.”

“Oh, three months is nothing, I swear. And school is starting soon, so you will have to focus on that,” Naoki chuckled, seeing his frozen smile and possibly also the desperation in his eyes. “You'll see, Riku, my dear. You will wake up one morning and Terra will be there and you will wonder how three months had gone by so quickly.”

“I hope you're right, Naoki. The wait will probably kill me, otherwise.”

“Don't be silly,” she scolded him, caressing his cheek like usual. He had missed – in that month and a half he had not seen her – that touch. It was maternal in that way that Riku craved the most, in that peculiar way that had left him when his mom had moved out of Poppytown. No matter how much his dad tried, he could never replace the hole Yula had left in Riku's heart. “Make sure to come by once he's back. I'll bake you a cake and we will have some tea, okay?” 

“Gladly. I'll bring Kairi, too. I know she doesn't come to visit you enough,” Riku told her. He was glad that at least someone in the town, other than himself, would welcome Terra back as he deserved. With love and care and a smile on their face.   



	4. Chapter Three

#### 

Chapter Three

With September upon them and the threat of school looming on their heads, it wasn't unusual to find Riku and Kairi out in the poppy fields, soaking up the still warm air of the last strands of summer and the freedom that came with the last of homework being done and a completely empty schedule for the entirety of the next week and a half. 

Riku loved the poppy fields. Even if the Corner House was there, too close for comfort, almost pulsing, vibrating with negativity and dark shadows. 

Kairi sighed, laying down in the middle of a patch of blooming flowers. They were nearly as red as her hair and she painted a beautiful picture. She said, voice airy and comfortable as Riku had not heard in a few days, “I wish summer never ended.”   
Every years she said the same thing, in the same tone, with the same sleepy and contented expression.   
And every year she would spend lamenting the heat and the humidity and the fact that she had to shave her legs and another million things about summer. 

“I wish school never started,” Riku said, because he wasn't a filthy liar. He was honest in his hatred of the hottest season and he would never sprout such blasphemy as Kairi dared to. 

“That too, yes,” she agreed, waving her hands in his direction. Riku huffed under his breath but he went anyway, laying down next to her, thinking about the stains he would have to clean off his clothes later. Kairi wrapped one of her arms around his neck and hugged him close to her chest, as she had so often done in her _terrible twelves_. The only year she had been taller than him.   
Riku had been a late bloomer. He had hit the majority of his growth spurts at sixteen, and he was glad those had happened at all, or Kairi would feel entitled to mistreat him only because he was short. 

Not that she wasn't already mistreating him anyway. 

“Hey, Riks,” she called him, poking him in the ribs. Riku squeaked, high-pitched and rightfully indignant. “What are we doing for my birthday?”

“Don't you already have plans with your girlfriend?” 

“Jealousy doesn't suit you, you big baby,” Kairi scolded him, and she poked him again, harder than before. “I want all of my friends close for my special day.”

“So you plan on closing me and Naminé in a room and demand we don't maul each other as your birthday wish?”

“You're not my only friends,” she spat out, looking at him with a disgusted and disappointed expression, mouth twisted in a grimace, brows furrowed down, shadowing her eyes. “I have plenty of friends.”

“Yeah? Name three,” he challenged her. 

“Olette, Pence and Hayner,” Kairi said, smug as a dolphin.   
Riku hated dolphins. Not that he had ever seen one of those in his life. 

“Only Olette counts. You don't even have Pence's and Hayner's phone numbers. That means you're not real friends.”

“Since when is your job to make the rules of true friendship?” Kairi asked, snatching a leave trapped in his hair. “You're the most asocial person on the planet.”

“So you think. I have plenty of friends,” Riku retorted, but they both knew it was a lie.   
He had one friend, and it was Kairi, and he was actually lucky the girl still put up with him, or he would find himself completely alone. 

“Name one that isn't me.”

“Terra,” Riku said, tearing a laughter out of Kairi's mouth.   
But it hurt.   
It hurt him to know that he couldn't say any other name but for his own brother's one. That he couldn't even count Naminé amongst his friends anymore, so decayed and spoiled their relationship had became.   
It hurt, but making Kairi laugh was one of his favorite things in the world, even if it was at his own expenses. 

*

September fifth of the year 2016 found Riku by surprise.   
He had awoken that day knowing that it was the last non-weekend day of summer vacation. The suddenness of it all blistering his skin and leaving an aftertaste of ashes in his mouth.   
Out in the fields, he lamented to Kairi all the time he had wasted on video-games and homework. Time he could have spent doing other, more exciting things. Things that would leave a mark in history. Things that would make his memory last for generations. 

“Like what? Killing your girlfriend and getting jail-time?” Kairi mumbled, sleep making her careless with her words.   
Riku could see the dark circles around her puffy eyes, the shaking of her hands, the uncharacteristic sweater on her shoulders.   
He had noticed all of that, and he knew Kairi as he knew the insides of his pockets, the back of his hands, but even so, he was not ready to forgive such a slip of her tongue. 

“Allegedly killing. You know he didn't do it.” 

“Do I?” Kairi asked, voice sweet and eyes challenging. “ _Do you?_ ”

“What's with you? Why are you trying to rile me up?” Riku questioned, tilting his head to the side to better stare at her body, laid out next to him.   
Her eyes caught the sunlight and they shone indigo and deep purple and sky-blue. She smirked, but it was weak and not _Kairi_ at all. 

“He's coming back. In two months, he will be out of prison,” Kairi said, looking square into his eyes, “what if he really is the killer? What if he comes after us next?”

“He is my brother!” Riku blurted out, stopping his face from scrunching up in pain. “I know him. He would never hurt anyone.”

He thought of August 2006.   
Of Terra not saying a word, of longing to hear his voice again, to hear him laugh despite everything that was happening.   
Riku had learned to wish to have been born first. That way, he could have protected Terra better, he could have helped better, he could have done something at all, instead of being a seven-year-old child with no agency and no knowledge of the world. 

“Remember that day he was suspended because he punched one of his classmates?” Kairi asked. Riku didn't know where she wanted to end up, with her words, but he didn't like it one single bit. 

“He deserved it,” he told her, and she had known. She had also agreed with him, then. Naminé too. They had all agreed it had been for the better. 

“Maybe Aqua _deserved_ it too?” she hissed, her body languid and peaceful, not a single muscle tense; her face a mask of anger and resentment. 

“He loved her.”

“I loved her more. She was my sister,” Kairi said, the barest hint of a creak in her voice. 

“Really, why are you doing this?”

“I told you,” she said. “He's coming back and I don't know how I should feel. Should I be scared? Angry? Tell me, Riks, how should I welcome him back?”

“You should feel whatever you feel, Kairi. Don't ask me to tell you. That's too easy,” he muttered.   
He himself didn't know how he should feel, why was she demanding he told her?   
The situation was a mess, and the only clear thing in his mind was that he loved Terra so much that it hurt his chest to know him in prison, to have him so far away. 

After a very long silence that threatened to drown Riku in anxiety and longing, Kairi said, staring up at the clear sky upon them: “Naminé told my dad.”

The entire world held its breath and sobbed, Riku felt Kairi's anger crawl down his spine, on his arms, on his legs. A thousand, poisonous ants ready to bite his flesh, to destroy. 

“The doc gave me some new pills to take,” Kairi added, as if it was barely a second thought, nothing to be worried about.   
Riku had been the one to tell her the medication would do her good, would make her feel better. But he had also been the one she confided into, the one she confessed to, whispering she didn't want to take any meds. Not anymore. “I never thought she would be such a goddamn snitch.”

It had been ten years.   
Kairi – and Riku and Naminé, too – had a right to finally get the full control of their lives. They had the right to decide for themselves. They had a right to keep quiet about everything they didn't want to talk about, with whomever they didn't want to talk to.   
Naminé had stripped Kairi of that right. She had done something that Riku wasn't sure Kairi would ever be able to forgive. 

She had seen a girl in the Corner House and Riku hadn't.   
She was getting bad again, and that was worrying and they, as her friends, had a right to be concerned, to care, to keep an eye on Kairi.   
But, really, after everything they had gone through, who didn't see things that didn't exist, sometimes?

“He said some shit about survivor's guilt, you know?” Kairi said, ignoring the fact that he wasn't participating in the conversation. She was too angry to bother about that, and Riku understood completely. “My new psych. I don't think he understand me, yet.”

“How–” Riku cleared his throat with a subtle cough, praying to God that she wouldn't notice how his voice sounded strained and wet. “How many times have you seen him?”

“Three? Maybe four. I think he wants to get me in a psych hospital,” she said, and her temples were wet and shining under the sun. “I don't want to go.”

“You don't have to,” Riku reassured her. 

“Actually,” she turned her eyes to meet his, and they sparkled with a mixture of frustration, terror and mirth, “I do. If they check me in, I can't say no.”

“That's not what I meant,” Riku said, his mind going back to an old house and an even older woman, to a frigid night in December, to the last few minutes of a year that he would have loved to forget everything and anything about. 

“Oh…” she muttered, and he could see her thoughts following his, her memory shining through her unbelievable irises. “I don't think that would be a good idea, Riks. They would catch us and… you know, consequences are a thing,” she murmured, trying to go for a grin. “We're not kids anymore.”

“Exactly. We have way more resources, now.”

“And way more punishment when we fuck up.”

“Optimism is a thing that you should try, sometimes,” Riku teased. 

“Fuck off, I'm the only optimist in this group!” Kairi laughed, but she was crying too, and Riku was breaking inside.  
There was nothing more heartbreaking than his best friend crying, just as there was nothing more beautiful than seeing Kairi smile. 

*

Naoki's words came back to him in November.   
The fog was covering the town in a humid, cold blanket, and there were whispers of the festive season all around. Murmurs of Christmas coming from the younger couples, and of New Year's festivals from the older population, could be heard all over the streets, no matter how far away those were, still. 

Naoki words came back to him while he walked back from school.   
The streets weren't any busier than they normally were, but for some reason the few staring eyes at his back were heavier than usual.   
Riku took longer than he should have to realize.   
In six days, his brother would be home.   
Less than a week.   
In less than a week he would be able to hug Terra again, to talk to him, to be next to him as he had so many times when he was a child. 

In the middle of the street, a sob tore from his chest, escaping his lips loud and inopportune, and oh so joyful and terrified and impatient.

*

Kairi texted him at two in the morning. _I have something to tell you._

Riku wasn't sleeping, yet. He doubted he would sleep at all, that night, since his heart was still racing with the knowledge that Terra's return was imminent.   
What was weird was for Kairi to be still awake. 

She gave everyone grief about how her meds made her sleepy and confounded, about how she needed thrice the normal amount of sleep. 

He called her, breath faster than a moment before, and he wondered if, maybe, something had happened to her, if maybe she had difficulty sleeping, now that she refused to spend the night with Naminé. If she was afraid, and restless, and panicking. 

It wouldn't have been the first time. 

“Since when do we send each other creepy, cryptic messages?” he asked, keeping his voice as low as he could. He wasn't as good as she was at whispering, but he had gotten better, since his childhood days. 

“Since I started doing stupid things without you,” she replied, shaking. Her hands were shaking too, Riku didn't have to wonder about that to know they were.   
Her teeth were cackling. She was probably outside, sitting on the roof of her house, in nothing but her pajama, freezing her ass off.   
She was always reckless when she was afraid. 

“What did you do?”

“Don't be mad at me, please,” she murmured, and Riku…   
Riku was pretty sure she was crying, too. 

“I won't get mad, I promise,” he told her, wrapping his blankets tighter around his shoulders, curling up under them like he would have done as a child. “Just tell me you're safe and I don't have to call an ambulance.”

“No, no. It's nothing like that.”  
Riku sighed in relief, but his fingers gripped the phone harder. “I never started to take meds again, you know? I told everyone I did but I didn't,” Kairi confessed, her voice not particularly repentant, not even sorry, honestly. She sounded pretty proud of herself. 

“Okay.”

“That's not it either, though. I mean, you all already knew I didn't want to take them.”

“Yes, Kai. We knew. Could you please get to the point?”

“She was still there.”  
Riku's muddled brain took a moment longer than necessary to connect the dots, and when it finally did, his breath stopped in his throat, forcing him to choose between coughing it out or choking on it. 

“You went to the house alone!?” he screeched, forgetting, for the moment, that his father was sleeping in the room in front of his, his door ajar, his soft snoring reaching Riku's ears with little troubles. 

“Are you mad at me?” Kairi asked, almost smug and scared half to death. 

Riku took a moment to breathe through the anger. “No,” he said, taking a lungful of cold air and trying to calm down his heartbeat.   
Kairi was home. Kairi was safe.   
The House hadn't–  
The Corner House hadn't hurt her in any way, no matter how terrified Riku was of it. “Just worried for you.”

“I already told you, you don't need to–”

“Kairi,” he called her, waiting until he heard her sigh. “You're my only friend,” he murmured. “It's obvious that I would worry about you.”

“That doesn't make it right, though.”

“Whenever have we bothered with right or wrong?”

“Never,” she agreed, “but we should start, sooner or later.”

“Tell me about the House. This is not a philosophy class,” Riku joked, even if the situation required anything more than it required jokes.   
There was nothing funny about it, nothing lighthearted and entertaining. 

“The girl I saw in August, you remember her?” Kairi inquired. 

“I didn't see anyone.”

“I know that!” she spat out, so forceful that Riku could perfectly imagine the bite coming with it, if he had been close to her. “I meant, do you remember me talking about her?” 

_Kairi said she has seen a girl today. In the Corner House._ Naminé had said. _I just want to know if you have seen someone too._ Riku wondered if she had been planning on selling Kairi out to her father already. If she had already planned every step of the betrayal. If she had wondered about the consequences that would follow. _I won't discuss this with you._ Naminé had told him, but maybe she should have. Maybe she should have run her machinations through him, so he would have let her know how stupid a plan it was.   
Kairi wasn't kind with people who broke her trust. Not even if they did so for her own good. 

“I remember Naminé telling me you saw someone,” he said. 

“I saw her again. Yesterday afternoon,” Kairi whispered, her voice clear as spring-water, breathy but not so much as to create white noise or interferences in the line between them. “She said–”

“She talked to you!?”

“Yes,” Kairi muttered, the cold November wind crashing against the mic of her phone, letting Riku hear all of its bite. Kairi used to say she saw Aqua everywhere, but her sister had never uttered a word. None of the things Kairi used to see had ever spoken to her. Or, if they did, she had never told Riku or Naminé about it. “She said she's not the only one trapped in the Corner House. She...” Kairi licked her lips. Riku knew he would see her the next day and found her with scabs all over her mouth, small and dark, visible even under the bright and weird-colored lipstick she would wear. “She asked me to help them.”

“Kairi…”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Do you?” he snapped at her.   
He didn't want to say it aloud, but it resonated between them anyway. 

“It sounds crazy, yeah. Just like me,” Kairi said, in the end, voicing the horrible thought running in circles around Riku's mind. He would have loved to shut it up, to punch it away, but it was there, overgrown and cruel and insensitive.   
He hated his mind, sometimes.   
Most of the time, actually. 

“Kai–”

“No, listen–”

“Kairi–”

“Riku, really! Listen to me!” she demanded, raising her voice and letting it crack, letting the tears fall, the sobs break her in two. Riku shut up. He would have sooner sewn his lips closed than worsening Kairi's pain. “I know that it sounds crazy. I know that it doesn't make sense, and maybe I should start taking the pills, but I wanted to talk to you exactly because I know that I could do it. We all know me, don't we?”

“We do,” Riku confirmed, nodding even if she couldn't see him. He knew she knew anyway. They had known each other for too long, after all. For all their lives. 

“Keep an eye on me, okay? Don't let me go there. Don't let me…” she gulped down, hard. “Don't let me disappear like _her._ ”

“I won't,” Riku told her, and he had to think, he had to wonder how it was, to distrust her own mind like that was, for Kairi. How horrifying, frightening, devastating it must have felt, to not be able to set limits, to mark the boundaries, because the next day her brain could work in a completely different way, because she wasn't the one in control. “I'm coming to your house,” he told her. The phone was nice, nicer than nothing, but he couldn't comfort her with only his voice. He didn't have that gift. “Give me five minutes to get dressed.”


	5. Chapter Four

#### 

Chapter Four

Riku crawled out of his bed at five in the morning. He showered, got dressed in his finest clothes, then undressed and wore his usual clothes, and then he undressed again and put on a few combination of the two.   
Eventually, he called Kairi. Not only she was her only friend, she was also very fashionable and Riku needed some fashion advice. 

“Wlergh...” she grumbled into the phone. Riku realized only then that it was barely five thirty and she would still be asleep. Like every normal human being.   
But not Riku. Because that day, Terra was coming home.   
At six thirty, his dad would leave to go and pick him up and at nine they would be home. Riku didn't have time to sleep. He had to get ready and start preparing something to eat for lunch, and maybe for breakfast, too, just in case his dad didn't stop along the way in some diner or something like that. 

“Kairi. Hello. Good morning. Sorry to wake you up,” he said, his voice and his body equally jumpy, jittery, almost glitching. 

“This better be life or death important, Riku. It's not yet dawn,” she hissed in the phone. Riku tried to imagine for her the threatening tone her voice should have had, because, as it was, she sounded like a grumpy kitten. 

“Terra is coming back in three hours and a half and I don't know what to wear.” 

“'Aight.” she drawled. “I'm gonna kill you.” He could see her rubbing her eyes with the heel of a hand, taking her hair back from her face, huffing in the pillow before sitting up. “You're gonna be at home,” she said.   
Riku didn't see how that made any difference at all. He hummed, as if hinting at her that she had to expand on that thought. Kairi, luckily, understood him like no one else. “Riks, my dear boy, my pal, my friend, you're in your own house. You could go naked and it wouldn't make a fucking difference. _You're in your home!_ ” 

“So what? It's been ten years. I want to look good for him,” he justified himself, crossing one arm on his chest before realizing he could complete the gesture because of the phone in his hand. 

“Go. Naked. That'll make a statement or something.”

“No. Listen, do I wear the suit? Or a tee and jeans? Or a button down and jeans? Or a tee and slacks? Maybe a polo? I need your help, Kai. This is very, super important,” he whined. The realization that he was begging her hit him in the face like a brick, but he didn't care.   
He would accept to be called _needy_ if she actually helped him. 

“Riku. You're an idiot,” she deadpanned. Riku flinched a little. He wondered if apologizing again for waking her up would have any good effect. “He hasn't seen you in ten years. He won't even see your clothes. You could be wearing my grandma's nightdress and he wouldn't see it.” 

“Okay. That doesn't help me any.”

“Go naked. That way there will be nothing for him to not see.” 

“Kai, please,” he lamented. 

“Nobody cares about clothes, Riku! It's 2016, get a life!”

“Humor me for a moment.”

“I am. I answered the phone, didn't I?” Kairi snapped. Next time he needed her, Riku would make sure to check the time before forwarding the call. A snappy Kairi was a bad, useless Kairi. “Skinny jeans and the yellow tee,” she said after a few seconds, sighing deeply and begrudgingly. 

“Yellow? Terra is not a big fan of yellow,” Riku muttered. 

“Then wear a fucking shirt of his favorite color, who cares!?”

“Okay. Right. Sorry, Kai. And thanks, you're the best best friend in the world.” 

“I already knew. Never call me again before the sun has risen or I will murder you.”   
She dropped the call and Riku stood in front of his closet with the phone held in his hand for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the open line.   
When the droplets of water got too cold on his neck and back, he finally snapped out of it and got dressed. 

He had wasted thirteen minutes. 

*

Eight and fifty-four.   
The clock ticked on and on, each step of the seconds' hand was slower than the one before, and Riku could have died in front of it, waiting with his breath held for the next minute to arrive.   
And then the next. And the next one again, and again, and again. 

It was entirely possible that his father would be late.   
Nine o'clock was an approximation at best, and a lie at worst. 

The food was ready; Riku had put it in the oven to not let the heat expire before his wayward family members had arrived.

His heart was trying to explode in his chest, fluttering like a mad butterfly, like an angry hornet ready to sting its prey. 

His phone vibrated. A text message.   
_Selfie?_ Kairi had written him. 

_No._

_I helpd u dress. Send me a fuckng selfie, u asshole._

_No._

_y?_

Riku scoffed and let the phone on the table. Three seconds later he felt guilty about it.   
_I spent the last three hours cooking. I'm a mess._ He wrote. 

_im bored and i want to see my bestie. Since hes not at school. (assolhe)_

_Fine. Learn to type, though._

_Fuk off._

Riku chuckled a little under his breath and snapped a photo of himself. 

_1 day im gon sell these photos, u kno?_

_To whom?_

_u have a lot of fans_

_Sure I do. Make sure to split the money equally, when you do._  
He could see Kairi typing without looking at the screen of her phone, with a hand hidden in her pocket, the other diligently writing down notes, head down on the desk, the perfect image of concentration. Only bothering to look at his replies when she was sure she wouldn't get caught.   
Kairi was very serious about going along with her teachers. 

She had a lot to lose in doing otherwise, after all.

_nope. Need the cash to buy cute dresses_ Kairi sent to him a few minutes later, and Riku shook his head at her, trusting that she knew he was doing it.   
For no real reason, he checked the clock.   
It read five minutes past nine.   
His father was late. 

*

Standing in the hallway, Riku didn't mean to do the impression of a wide-eyed, innocent boy who was definitely too close to tears for comfort.   
It wasn't in his intentions to steal the role Terra had aced in his first eighteen years. 

But now Terra was twenty-eight and he looked sharp, angular, cutting. Where he had been kinda chubby, in his teens, he was now a bundle of muscles. His jaw was straight, teeth still as perfect as Riku remembered, and his eyes were had as bones.   
“You…” Terra muttered, staring at him. Riku's throat was as dry as a desert. Tongue knotted in impossible ways. 

He tried to stumble out a word, but his voice was gone.   
He was feeling like he had never know Terra at all.   
He had been eight when the police had took his brother away, and his father had never wanted to bring him along on his visits to the penitentiary.   
No. His father had completely _forbidden_ him to go see Terra.   
And now Riku couldn't even recognize his own brother. 

“You've grown a lot,” Terra said, eventually. He was stiff, standing in the hallway, and their father didn't look any better. Riku gulped down again and again and again. 

“Welcome back,” he finally managed to say. It was a bit too late, but Terra's eyes shone and Riku patted himself on the back for choosing the right thing to say, for once in his life. Even if it was awkward and stilted and mistimed. 

“Thank you,” his brother choked out. “It's good to be back. It's good to see you.”

“You too,” Riku said, his teeth sawing the inside of his cheek, the skin raw and bitten through and bleeding. He didn't care about any of that, he didn't care about the sharp pain, the discomfort that would come later, while the wounds healed.

He felt his eyes burning, the tears coming up to them like iron to a magnet, and he threw himself at his brother, turning off every part of his brain that begged him to maintain the act of a composed, mature seventeen-year-old boy with no need for affection and such disgusting stuff. 

Terra's arms wrapped around his waist, gripping him as tight as to cause Riku to stop breathing. Or maybe it was the situation in general that was making it impossible for him to breath.   
Terra was back. He was in his arms. He was so close to him as to be able to smell his scent.   
Terra was home.   
Finally.   
After ten years of separation, they were back together. 

“I think that's enough,” their father said, trying to move in between them, trying to force them to separate. If Riku had been a little more aggressive, in that moment he would have probably growled at the man. Or tried to bite him, as Kairi would have done. 

“You kept us apart for ten years. I think it's on us to decide when it's enough,” he told the man, letting all the resentment slip into his voice. For ten years he had been silent about that, never once pushing his father to take him to see Terra, never being a burden, never throwing a tantrum about the unfairness of it all. But now he had his brother back and he would hug him for fifteen consecutive hours if he wanted to. His father had no right to take that, too, away from him. 

*

It was a Saturday afternoon when Kairi called.   
Three days after Terra had come back.   
Riku had spent those seventy-two hours glued to his brother side. They didn't talk much. They did nothing but to bask in each other's presence. And Riku could honestly say that those three days were the best of his life. 

Kairi said, voice broken and moist: “I broke up with Naminé.” Riku didn't say anything for a long, long minute. Sixty seconds that felt like hours and hours and maybe even an entire day could have passed by in his silence. 

“What happened?” He eventually asked, because no word of comfort came to his mind, to his mouth.   
His lips were dry as the soil of a plant that had not been watered for a while, and Riku thought of the ever blooming poppies in the fields, for no other reason than the fact that Kairi reminded him of the red petals and soft leaves and–  
She didn't want to get lost.   
But she would if she continued to push people away. 

“She betrayed me,” Kairi shouted in the phone. Her voice was painful to hear and painful to let out, no doubt.   
When Kairi screamed, the whole Earth shook, frightened and pitying.   
Riku shook too, and he laid against the arm Terra had around his shoulders, taking comfort in his brother's silent presence.   
He wasn't a selfish kid anymore, he didn't care if Terra was more comfortable not talking. He didn't care if he couldn't hear his voice. All that mattered was having him at his side. “She betrayed me,” Kairi repeated, slower and quieter, her voice nothing more than the sad, dying song of a little bird, her wings torn and her body bloody, laid out on the ground. 

“She doesn't deserve you,” Riku said, but he didn't know if it was the right thing to say.  
Of all the bad things he had imagined would happen to them, that year, he could have never thought of Kairi and Naminé breaking up.   
They were perfect for each other. Always had been.   
And always would be, too, in Riku's mind. Even if Naminé had betrayed Kairi's trust in a way that was probably irremediable. “And you don't deserve what she did to you,” he added, because sometimes Kairi needed to hear that not everything bad that happened was her fault. That she had the same right everyone else had to live a happy, peaceful life.   
Because Kairi had grown up alongside him and Riku knew her and he knew she was not the confident young woman that everyone praised her to be. 

“Dad wants to get rid of me, Riks,” she whispered. She had always been good at whispering, even when her voice was cracking and screaming at the top of her lungs was the only thing she wanted to do.   
Kairi was good at doing a lot of things that she didn't want to do. “He wants to send me away.”

“You're not obligated to go,” he told her, “not if you don't want to.”   
They had lived by that, back in the days, back in 2006, when a lot of people were trying to force them – all three of them, because then, Naminé had still been a very important part of their lives, before she ostracized herself by being an insufferable, tactless asshole – to do things they didn't want to do. 

“But what if I am?”

“I will come with you,” he promised. “And we will come back together.”   
Nothing was impossible, as long as they were together.   
Nothing would stop them, if they worked together. 

Kairi murmured something in the phone. Something Riku couldn't understand, and then she called out to him: “Riku,” she said, “tonight… Tonight keep an eye on me, please,” she asked of him, and Riku nodded, and he knew – he **knew** – she knew, she had somehow seen him do it, but he answered her anyway. 

“Of course,” he said aloud, “I'll come by your house sometimes near three, okay?”

“If I'm not there–”

“You will be there, Kairi. Nothing will happen.”

“If I'm not there, Riku,” she repeated, more strongly this time, “come looking for me, will you?”

“Yes, I will. I would never let you get lost, remember?” he murmured. Terra was looking at him with worried eyes, thin, whitened lips.   
He was probably thinking of Aqua.   
Riku wondered if Aqua had ever been scared that she would get lost, that she would disappear one day.   
He wondered if Aqua had ever pleaded Terra to go and look for her. 

*

“What's happening, Riku?” Terra asked him, spooking hm half to death, the iron gate swinging back against the fence, banging way too loudly in the night.   
Riku hoped their dad would not wake up. “Why are you going out at three in the morning?” his brother questioned, moving closer, a graceful shadow in the night, invisible but for a pendant at his neck that reflected the light of a not-so-distant street lamp. 

“Kairi,” he muttered, but he didn't want to explain more than that. He didn't want to bring every one of Kairi's problems to Terra. To anyone that wasn't already in the clear, actually.   
He didn't want to betray her like Naminé had, and risk Kairi pushed him away too. “She asked me to keep and eye on her,” he ended up saying, since Terra's expression was way over the line of skeptic. 

“Kairi needs you to go check up on her at three in the morning?” his brother asked him, arms crossed on his broad chest. He had tied his hair up in a ponytail, and he looked way too comfortable in a flimsy tank top, considering the frigid air of the early morning. “Do you really expect me to believe that, Riku?”

“What–? Yeah. It's the truth!” he told his brother, frowning a little as his head turned to the side. Riku didn't trust that his expression was anywhere near friendly and he didn't want to look at Terra unkindly.

“I'm coming with you,” Terra said, and Riku knew better than to question it. His voice sounded exactly like their father's did when he said something final.   
Finality, when taken from other people, sat uncomfortably on Riku's shoulders and nape. He didn't like it one bit.

“Okay,” he grumbled, and then he resumed his steps, somewhat warmed by the sound of Terra's feet connecting with the ground, counterpoint to his in a way that Riku couldn't even explain.

Kairi's house wasn't far from theirs, but it was still a long walk to have in a tense silence and howling, late November wind.

Terra gripped his shoulder. They were roughly at half-point in their journey, and Riku jumped out of skin. His brother whispered to him, “You're not getting yourself in anything dangerous, are you?” Riku hadn't realized that his brother was as good as Kairi herself at whispering.   
He let himself be swayed and carried by Terra's soft voice and he marveled at its beauty.   
What made it even more beautiful was the fact that he hadn't heard it for a very long time.

“No,” he answered, but he didn't know if it was the truth.   
He didn't know if he would ever have to go in the Corner House to look for Kairi, or even somewhere worse than that.   
He would, if the need were to arise.   
He would never let Kairi disappear like Aqua had. He had promised he wouldn't.

“Good,” Terra said, and again, it was final. It was imposing and demanding something that Riku didn't recognize, something he didn't know if he was willing to give.

*

_I'm outside your window_ , he wrote to Kairi, sending the text with shaking fingers.   
It was probably just the cold.

“Are we supposed to go inside?” Terra asked him, staring at the screen of his phone from behind his shoulder.   
Riku kinda wanted to take half a step back to collide with his brother's chest and snuggle against it until he felt sure that Terra would never leave again. 

More over so because, despite wearing nothing but a tank top, Terra was a heater on legs and Riku was fricking cold.

“Depends on what she says,” Riku told him. “If she needs me to, I'll go inside. You can wait here.”

After a few moments, Terra spoke again. “Kairi… Is she okay?” he asked.

Riku thought of the photograph in Terra's room. The one in which Aqua is kissing his cheek. The one he had talked about to Ventus, back in August.   
They had been happy, then. But there had been more than happiness in the eyes of Terra, in that photograph, at that time.   
There still was, Riku supposed.   
“She could be better,” he answered, because for some reasons, he wanted to be honest with his brother.   
He deserved the truth. 

“Are you being a good friend to her?” 

“Of course.” 

“Good.” Finality, again.   
Terra must have become a pro at finality, to let it spill from his lips three times in less than an hour.   
Riku hoped – but he knew it was pointless – that finality was the only thing his brother had learned in jail. “I think…” Terra murmured, “I think _Aqua_ would have liked to know that you two are close.” He said Aqua's name like the majority of people called out to their gods, and Riku wanted to cry in his stead, because there was still more than affection in his eyes, when he thought of her, but it was so torn and pained that it was almost unrecognizable.   
There was still love in his brother's eyes and Riku wanted to give him Aqua back, even if it was impossible. 

His phone buzzed in his hand. It was nothing less than a miracle that stopped him from dropping it on the ground in fear. 

_Go home. It's freezing outside_ , Kairi had written. 

_Are you alright?_

_I'm fine. Go home_

_Are you sure you don't want me to come in for a minute?_

_Yes. I'm good, you can go back_ , Kairi sent him. It felt wrong, somehow.   
The entire conversation felt wrong. Not quite like every other chat he had had with Kairi.   
He wanted to be an optimist about it and think that his best friend was probably sleepy and that was all there was to it, but he knew that optimism did nothing to help real life situations like that one. 

If he left without checking on Kairi, everything could have happened and it would have been his fault for not doing anything to prevent it.   
Riku was a good friend. It was his duty as a good friend to make absolutely sure that Kairi was fine enough to be left alone with herself. 

“I'm going in. I'll be a minute,” he told Terra, escaping the not-hug his brother had him into and moving towards the window. He had opened it too many times in his life for it to pose as a real obstacle. 

When he peeked inside, the room was empty.


	6. Chapter Five

#### 

Chapter Five

“Meet me in the fields. At the pole,” he said, gripping the phone so hard as to make his knuckles go white.   
Terra was staring into the darkness, Kairi's house at their backs, their hands shaking like leaves ready to fall off their branches.   
Riku was not ashamed to admit that he was scared.   
Beyond scared, honestly, because Kairi wasn't answering his texts anymore and he had no idea where she might have gone, except for the Corner House.   
There was not a place on the whole wide Earth he hated more than the Corner House. 

“ _Do you have any idea what time is it?_ ” Naminé asked him, scathing like a viper. Riku was afraid he would get poisoned by her voice only, hissed through the line between them. 

“Kairi is missing,” he said, trying not to shake any more than he already was. He didn't want to have Naminé by his side. He didn't want to need her. But he did.   
Naminé had always been a part of the group, even after their fight had taken them apart from each other. “I think she's in the House.”  
He could almost see the shudder running down Naminé's spine, the way her hands clenched around the white covers of her bed, her shoulders hunched forward, her body looking smaller than it had ever been.   
“I need you here,” he confessed, feeling his insides turn to putrid mud, and at the same time turning holy and blessed.

He had always needed Naminé, even if he had never admitted it. 

“ _I'll be there,_ ” the girl murmured, her voice cold as a spear made of ice, piercing the static in between their breaths. “ _Don't go inside before I've arrived._ ”  
Riku didn't need to tell her that he would never. She knew how much he feared the House. 

*

“I don't like this,” Terra said to him, his hand intertwined with Riku's like a lifeline neither of them was willing to let go of. 

“Nor do I,” Riku agreed, squeezing his fingers around his brother's own, wishing he could stop his legs from moving forward, that he could turn around and go back home, lay down on his bed, cuddle with his brother until sleep took them both over.   
He wished his life was happier. “But it's for Kairi. You can go home, if you want. I won't keep it against you.”

“Don't be an idiot,” Terra spat out, stepping to the side to be closer to him. Riku basked in his warmth, wondering for the umpteenth time how his brother could stand outside in the cold, unmerciful wind without shaking, without freezing his fingers off, when he was only wearing a tank top. It probably was the biggest mystery of the night. “I would never let you go in there alone. That place is dangerous.”

“I know,” Riku said, and he thought “ _Kairi said she had seen a girl, today. In the Corner House._ ” Naminé's voice echoed around his brain, crashing against his skull over and over and over again, never-ending and terrifying.   
He didn't repeat the words aloud. He had the feeling he had already done that too many times to be considered a neurotypical, and the last thing he needed was another psychiatrist trying to put him on medication.   
Maybe he had developed an obsession for the Corner House, or maybe his obsession was Kairi herself, or maybe his obsession was the year 2006.   
The year his life had lost all sparks of happiness. 

“Do you remember what happened in September?” Terra asked, but it was more than a simple question. It was fear spilling from his lips like an endless song, it was a prayer to never hear an answer. 

Riku answered anyway. “No.”

“Good,” Terra muttered, and he held his hand tighter, much over the line of painful. Riku didn't stop him, accepting the contact for what it really was. A need for comfort.   
The only kind that Terra could ask for, demanded and taken without permission because that was the only way he could ask for it.

“Do you?” Riku inquired.   
When the police had interrogated him about the first days of September, back in 2006, Riku had thought that no one knew what had happened to him.   
He had thought so for ten years.   
His father had never wanted to spill one single word about the entirety of the cursed year, and Riku had never forced him to, because that would have been much crueler than he was willing to be.   
His dad, despite all his flaws and mistakes, didn't deserve cruelty from him. 

“Yes,” Terra murmured.   
They were at the pole, blooming poppies at their knees, leaves caressing their ankles, their feet.   
The poppies were always blooming. Always red like blood, maybe two shades lighter than Kairi's hair, and the petals were just as soft as her skin. “But I won't talk to you about it,” his brother said, and Riku, subconsciously, sighed in relief. 

He said, “I wouldn't ask you to. I don't want to know.”

*

Naminé arrived much later, covered in white from head to toe, like she had just passed through a snowstorm.   
But the snow wouldn't come to Poppytown for a month, still, not until the festivals had started, and the white against her pale skin was mostly wool and cotton, her boot leather and faux-fur.   
Her eyes were hate and war, the concern Riku was expecting from her buried under a billion layers of wrath. 

She had grown up too, he realized once she was close enough, once he could finally see her in perfect definition, just a few feet separating them.   
She had grown up to be beautiful and majestic, her freezing rage looking god-like and divine.

“You didn't say your brother would be here too,” she spat out at him, sparing only the barest glare in Terra's direction. 

“I didn't think it would be important, considering the circumstances,” he hissed back, crossing his arms and trying his best to look taller and bigger and intimidating. 

“Well, _I_ think letting me know I will have to meet up with a murdered is important under any circumstances,” she said, and Riku didn't care that her voice was shaking, that she was probably lying about her own beliefs just because she couldn't back down after all those years had passed by. He didn't care that he knew she didn't think the words she had said. She had said them anyway, and they still hurt like knives stabbing his heart, even if they weren't true. 

“Terra is not a murderer,” he whispered, keeping at bay the need to punch her teeth out. 

“Where's Aqua, then?”

“Nobody knows. Her body was never found! It shouldn't even have been ruled as a murder,” he told her, clenching his jaw painfully. He would have a sore face, the next morning. If he ever reached it alive, that was it. 

“She's still in the House,” Terra murmured, eyes glued to the ground, to the flowers beneath them, under their feet.   
Stepping on them felt like killing a bit of Kairi, to Riku, and he tried to spoil the least possible of them, in fear that he might kill his best friend, if he ever crushed too many. 

“That's bullshit. The Corner House is not kidnapping people,” Naminé said, but her voice was still shaking and she was still lying between her teeth, her fear plain on her pretty face.   
Riku wanted to believe her words, and he wanted for everyone to believe them too. 

He wanted those words to be true, because in that way he would never have to fear the Corner House as much as he did.  
Sadly for everyone involved, those words were the least believable thing ever.   
The Corner House was evil, no matter how silly and impossible it sounded. And maybe it kidnapped people, too. Maybe the girl Kairi had said she had seen in there was true and was just another one of the House's victims. 

Maybe the House still held Aqua, and Sora, and Roxas too.   
Maybe they were all in there, waiting for someone – for them – to go and save them.   
Maybe Kairi was in there, too. 

“You never go there, though,” Riku said to her, and it was incredibly kind. As if he didn't want to fault her for her innate fear of the House, when, in reality, he wanted to throw in her face every single contradiction of her life.   
He didn't want to be nice to her. She didn't deserve it. 

“It's an abandoned building. It's creepy,” Naminé snapped. “But that doesn't mean the House is keeping people hostage.”

“But if you think nothing had happened in there–”

“I don't,” Naminé interrupted him, glaring into his eyes. “Kairi's sister died in there, Riku.”

“Where's the body, then? The police searched the entire building and they didn't find it.”

“Ask your brother, not me! He is the killer.”

“He is not!” Riku screamed at her. She scoffed and bumped his arm with her shoulder as she stepped beside him, going towards the Corner House, walking briskly and stomping her feet all over the poppies. 

“I thought we had something to do,” she said, and it sounded mocking and worried at the same time.   
It had been long since the last time Riku had understood her, and it had been forever since he had not been able to read her like an open book. 

*

“Where have you been!?” their father screamed at them as they stepped into their house. Riku was still feeling eyes all over his back, no trace of tiredness in his veins but an indescribable, countless amount of fright pulsing all through his body. He wondered if Terra was feeling the same as him. 

“Early morning jogging,” he lied, knowing well enough what the man would have said if he ever were to tell him he had been to the Corner House looking for Kairi. 

Kairi that was lost.   
Kairi that he hadn't found.   
Kairi that he had let disappear, just like he had promised her he wouldn't have. 

Riku didn't need a scolding, in that moment. The only thing he needed was for his best friend to be back.   
How unfair, his life was, to give him back his brother only to take away Kairi. 

But, he supposed, he was the only one amongst the three of them – the core group of his friends – that wouldn't miss anyone, otherwise.   
Maybe it was Destiny trying to set the score right, to keep them all even. 

“Don't bullshit me, Riku,” his father hissed, taking a step forward in their direction.   
Terra's clenched his fists, almost moving in front of him, but Riku put a hand on his forearm and reserved a small, pitiful, forced smile for him.   
This wasn't jail. This was their home and no matter how angry their dad was, he was not a dangerous man. He would never hurt Riku. 

“We couldn't sleep,” he said to his father, shrugging a little. It was so hard to fake a calm exterior when he was freaking out about Kairi's disappearance, but he couldn't let the man know. He couldn't let him suspect that something was wrong. Even more wrong than his sons being out in the middle of the night for no reason at all. “So we decided to go for a walk and… You know, make up for lost time.”

“You couldn't make up for lost time inside the house!?” his father snapped, his voice cracked in the middle of the question, and in between the cracks Riku could see the panic filling him up.   
Well, he would have panicked too, if he had lost someone he loved in the middle of the night. 

Oh, wait.   
He had.   
Kairi had not been in her room.  
Kairi had not been in the Corner House.   
Kairi wasn't anywhere.  
He had let her disappear. 

“Claustrophobia,” Terra muttered. It was probably more letters than he had said overall in all the three – now four, maybe – days he had spent inside the house.   
Riku hadn't noticed before, but now it came to him that probably Terra didn't feel too comfortable, sharing his space with a man that thought of him as a murderer.  
His brother didn't feel safe in his own home.   
Riku heart broke in a thousand pieces. 

“Oh…” their father gasped, stepping back until his shoulders hit the wall of the atrium, just beside the door that gave into the living room. “I see,” he said, just as broken as Riku was feeling.   
Nobody would have described that moment as something less than desperate and anguished.   
They were nothing more than a broken family trying to make do with the shreds of what they had had, once upon a time, before 2006 had happened to them all, tearing them apart, cutting them open and leaving them on the ground to bleed, in the open, for everyone to see. 

“There's no one to judge you in the middle of the night,” Riku said, because it had come at him in that moment, that it was a very plausible excuse for why Terra would have wanted to go for a walk at three to five in the morning.  
There was no one in the streets, in those hours. There were no malicious eyes, no stares, no sharp tongues to whisper behind his back. 

But there had been Naminé, so it hadn't been an easy time anyway. And Riku was to blame for that. 

“Yes,” their father said, nodding to himself, to them; nodding to the void sounds of their house.   
It wasn't a home, in that moment. It didn't feel warm, or welcoming, or loving.  
The walls were too white, too empty, too sterile. They felt like a prison, and Riku had had enough of thinking of prisons for a lifetime. Maybe for even more than one. “I didn't realize. I'm sorry for yelling at you,” he said, and finally Terra relaxed, at Riku's side, and he could let his hand fall away from his arm, even if he didn't want to. 

“It's okay,” Riku reassured the man for the both of them, not knowing if Terra was feeling up to speaking again. There was no need for him to, though, because Riku could read him well enough to be able to pitch in for him too.   
That was what a good little brother should have done, right?  
Be there to help.   
He was okay with being there to help Terra, more than okay, really. 

*

“ _Hello?_ ” Naoki's voice was croaked and distant, static filling the majority of the line in between them. Riku took a deep breath and forced himself not to choke. Not to be afraid. 

“Naoki,” he said into the phone, his eyes trained on Terra, laid out on the bed in Riku's room, staring back at him with empty sockets, as if he was nothing more than a skeleton pretending to be alive.   
In that moment, Riku realized that Terra had risked his life every single day for ten years.   
Jail wasn't a happy place. Nor was it safe.

Poppytown wasn't one, either. 

“ _Riku?_ ” the woman asked, sounding maybe a pinch more awake, more alert. “ _Sweetie, what is it? Is a bit early to call, isn't it?_ ” she asked. Riku didn't know her well enough to know what she was feeling, what she was doing, if she watched the alarm on her nightstand or if she glanced at the screen of her phone to know the time, if she sat up on her bed, rubbing her eyes as Kairi always did. 

“We have a problem, Naoki,” he muttered. Terra nodded at him and Riku took another breath, it was harder to force his lungs to expand and contract, harder to hear Kairi's mom's voice amongst the static, the white noise. 

There was white noise everywhere, all around him, tiptoeing on his skin, down his throat and down his spine.   
White static in between his temples, inside his brain, in his mouth; like liquid bones covering everything they touched.   
He didn't remember what to say, for a fleeting moment, and then he breathed again, and his mind cleared just enough for his voice to make it out of his lips, “I've let her disappear.”

*°*

_Where are you?_

_Kairi?_

_Kairi, please?_

_I called Naminé._

_I'm in the Corner House, Kairi._

_Kairi please, I'm begging you._

_Kairi, tell me where you are._

_Kairi, where the fuck have you gone, you dipshit!?_

_If you don't tell me where you are I'm gonna find you and I'm gonna kill you._

_I swear to God, Kairi!_

_I really hate you._

_Kairi, I'm sorry._

_I'm sorry._

*°*

Riku couldn't believe morning had actually arrived, after all.   
He had thought the world would stop for a few hours, let them regain their breathing, their thoughts, prepare a new plan of action.  
He had thought God would be so kind as to let them get prepared for the onslaught of problems waiting for all of them behind their closed doors. 

His room, that still, conveniently, came with a full package of ' _Supportive Brother 2.8_ ', was the last safe heaven he had. The last save spot before the battle began, and Riku didn't want to leave it.   
Riku didn't want to acknowledge the truth that had transpired the day before. 

_I'm sorry too_. Kairi had written him.   
Because Kairi was an asshole and she had had to wait ten hours before letting him know she was still alive.   
_If_ she was still alive.   
If it was truly Kairi writing those text messages and not some impostor who had a better grasp than his best friend had ever had at their language.   
_Please forgive me, Riku._ She had written him, and he wondered if her hands had been shaking, if she had thought of the consequences, even for a moment, before disappearing, if she had tried to stop herself from leaving her room. 

If she had left willing or if she had been pulled away from her own life, kicking and screaming for help. 

_Don't ever come in the Corner House again._


	7. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I noticed that in this chapter there's an awful lot of ableist language, in particular against mentally ill people, so I tagged it. If this triggers you, please don't read or do it with caution.

#### 

Chapter Six

Kairi shuddered.  
The air wasn't cold, it wasn't warm.  
It wasn't _real_.

She probably wasn't real either. 

What had changed in the last three days of her life?  
She had had to ask herself that particular question at least once every hour, and still she didn't have an answer.  
She didn't have any answer at all, just a feeling of impending doom coursing through her veins, seeping into her bones, down to the marrow, and she didn't understand anything of what was going on, but Xion still talked on and on and on, explaining this and that, stopping in the middle – was it the middle, was there and end at all? – of the hallways to laugh at flower pots. 

Kairi knew she was weird, and she was clinically-tested sick in the head, but Xion wasn't all there. She was unhinged at best, completely mental at worst. She should have been locked up in one of those white rooms with soft walls, because she was mad. 

“You're not listening to me and you're going to die,” the girl snapped at her, brows furrowed and fists planted on her hips.  
She kind of reminded Kairi of her mom. 

Except that her mom had never told her she was going to die. “I don't understand why you newbies never listen, it's like you think I don't have complete and absolute knowledge over this absurd place,” she rambled on, her eyes not focused on Kairi but still on the flower pot.  
She wondered what was so amazing in a vase with a fake flower in it, but she didn't ask that aloud. “I'm trying to keep all of you alive and you're being unreasonable.”

“Sorry,” Kairi said, waving her hand in a little, almost aborted gesture. “I thought you asked me to help you, though. You're not telling me how to help, you're staring at a… Is that supposed to be a peony?”

“Supposed to? What do you mean by that?” Xion questioned her, narrowing her eyes. Her hands moved so fast that Kairi couldn't even seen them until they were cradling the blue pot. She wondered if the girl was planning to throw it against her head. “It's a chrysanthemum, by the way, you suck at flowers.”

“Reassuring. That's the death flower, right?” she asked, ignoring the jabs at her knowledge. Had it been Riku, instead of Xion the Mad Girl, Kairi would have bitten him. 

“No,” Xion told her, turning her head to stare at her, very slowly, with her lips pressed together to form a pale line in her face, her eyes excessively wide. “It represents nobility.” 

“Oh, amazing,” Kairi said, smiling so wide that her cheeks started to hurt. She knew, somehow, that Xion wouldn't grasp the sarcasm. 

“Hey, are you bothering the newbie again?” a masculine voice interrupted their conversation.  
Kairi could only hope and pray that the new arrival was a little bit more put together, mentally speaking.  
She had had enough of trying to reason with Xion and her defective functions. 

Okay, that sounded very mean even to herself. She wouldn't have appreciated it, if someone had talked about _her_ in that way.  
Kairi took a deep breath and tried to regain her kindness. She knew she still had some of that stored somewhere in her heart. 

“No,” Xion spat out, gritting her teeth so hard that Kairi could almost hear the bones of her jaws grinding together. “I'm trying to keep her alive. As I did for you.”

“We kept each other alive, Xi, thank you very much,” the voice responded, and Kairi could feel someone nearing from behind her, the nonexistent air moving along with the body stepping forward, the hallway brightening and darkening at the same time, the colours getting more real, more vibrant, and then turning down, going back to their sepia gradient like thy had never been alive at all. 

Kairi thought of Riku, that couldn't bear people coming at him from behind, that always threw glances at his own back in fear of discovering someone there, spying him and following him and trying to take him from his home, the people he loved. “All you did was scare us to death.”

“Be kind, Roro,” a second voice scolded, so chipper as to sound fake. Like a recording.  
Kairi couldn't believe someone so frisky-sounding could be found in the Corner House.  
Maybe they were even more mental than Xion. 

Kairi felt fabric brush against her arm, but she didn't turn around.  
“Welcome!” one of the two boys greeted, offering a hand for her to shake. His smile was as bright as the sun. 

“This is not a happy place,” Xion muttered, stabbing him in the side with her fingers held straight. The guy wheezed a little but his expression didn't falter. “You don't welcome newbies, you mourn for them.”

“Well, if we had all your same attitude, we would have killed each other a long time ago and there would be no one in the House anymore,” the boy said, beaming at Xion. 

Kairi's phone vibrated again and she stared at the screen, her chest constricting until she couldn't even breath anymore. 

_The police is here. They think Terra killed you._ Riku's text said.

After a moment, a second message appeared on her screen. _I'm sorry_ , Naminé had sent her.

She deleted both. 

“So,” she started, clearing her throat a little. She tried to convince herself it was only dust stuck in the back of her mouth. “Who are you?”

The second guy's expression twisted in a disgusted grimace.  
Yeah, Kairi could understand that. 

“He is my brother. You can call him Thirteen. Or Roro,” the smiling boy said. “And I'm whatever you want to call me.”

“Usually goes by Idiot,” Xion supplied. 

“Or Ball of Sunshine,” Thirteen added, shooting the girl a frigid glare. 

“I'm Ka–”

“Wait!” Ball of Sunshine interrupted her, putting both of his hands forward, almost touching her mouth with his palms. “No real names in the House.”

“Oh…” Kairi muttered, trying to remember if she had introduced herself to Xion or not. “Um, you can call me… I don't know. It's a… Um,” she mumbled.  
She had never been a creative person, she couldn't think up a fake name on the spot, and she didn't want to use one of her friends', just in case they found themselves trapped in the Corner House just like she had. 

“You can think about it later, it's not a big deal,” Sunshine told her, patting her shoulder; his hand was warm. 

“The idiot has been here for a thousand years and he still doesn't have one, so you're in the clear,” Xion said, shrugging. 

“A thousand sounds a bit too much, don't you think?” Thirteen asked, side-eying the girl with a blond eyebrow raised. 

“What sounds like an appropriate amount, then?” Xion rebuked, staring at him with the same expression she had aimed at Kairi when she had been wrong about the meaning of the chrysanthemum.  
That face almost warranted a punch. 

“Who knows? I'm lacking a calendar,” Thirteen told her, shrugging his shoulders. 

“You're lacking many things,” Xion muttered. 

°

Sunshine took her exploring.  
Kairi much preferred him to Xion, because he was a smiling ball of happiness and he was still smiling even after three hours of walking.  
And he spoke to her like to a friend, instead of an idiot with no brain whose only wish was to get killed at her first opportunity.

“So, how did you end up in here?” Sunshine asked her, his arm linked with hers, his steps slow enough not to have Kairi panting but quick enough not to ' _attract attention_ '. His words, not hers. 

“Curiosity,” she said, and she wondered if it was the truth.  
Naminé would have probably said it was closer to an obsession than to simple curiosity, and Riku would have called her an idiot and he would have begged her not to talk about the House anymore, for no reason at all.

“So, this is not an adventure for you?”

“No,” Kairi told him, frowning a little at her own shoes. Nothing of the situation tasted like an adventure.  
To be considered one, it should have had Riku and Naminé in it, and Kairi speaking to them both, and the both of them speaking to each other with no animosity or pent up anger and frustrations.  
There was nothing adventurous in getting lost in a House.  
In _the_ House.

Kairi wondered how many nightmares she had had that had featured the Corner House, in the ten years since the building had became relevant in her life. 

“Pity,” Sunshine said, pursuing his lips in a half pout. “It loses some of its fun, if you don't think of it as an adventure.”

“I don't think there is much fun to lose,” she told him, shrugging at his dismayed expression.  
Mental, just like she had thought.  
Only a mad person would think there was any fun in the Corner House. 

“I know, right?” Sunshine said, and Kairi felt confused right down to her bones. To her soul. “But, I mean, life is an adventure in itself, isn't it? Like, we could go down that hallway and, sbam, an adventure!”

“You're not making any sense, you know?” Kairi told him, and she was thinking about Terra and Riku and the police invading their house and she was thinking about herself, too, that could have stopped all that, prevented all that, if only she had not been a complete asshole. 

°

“For the moment, we will call you Princess, does it sound good?” Thirteen asked her. His left eye was swollen and red.  
As she was an expert on punched eyes, she knew it was going to become black before the new day started.

Her phone told her it was seven at night, but she had no way to determine if it was true or if the House was messing with time.

“It's okay,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. A name was a name. Since she couldn't use her own, she would do with whatever else was given to her. 

“You'll have to find one, someday, though,” Thirteen warned. “A given name is just as bad as a true name.”

“Unless you're Xion, of course,” Sunshine added, his voice tailing perfectly at the end of his brother's one, as if they were used to end each other sentences.  
Probably they were, Kairi thought.  
Some siblings were known to be as close to one another. Not that she had first hand experience on that, she had had the chance to _live_ her own sister for only six years of her life, after all. 

“Don't talk about me,” Xion growled from her corner of the room.  
She looked exactly like the day Kairi had seen her for the first time, half shrouded in shadows, with her dark coat and dark hair making her almost impossible to see, the shine of her blue eyes incredible in the dim lights of the room. 

“What's different about you?” Kairi asked her.

“She was born here,” Thirteen answered in the girl stead, and he stumbled forward a moment later, a glare already directed towards Xion's corner. 

“I said,” she hissed, letting her brightened hand dim down, “to not talk about me.”

“As you can see, she's a real sweetheart,” Sunshine joked, but Kairi didn't think she was imagining the dark current under his voice; it was like a burning shock, a streak of ice so cold as to blister skin, dangerous like death itself.  
Nobody else seemed perturbed by his voice, though. 

°

Kairi didn't think they were fighting each other. Or, at the very least, they were not fighting each other in the same way she usually fought with her friends. 

There was no awkwardness in their interactions, and she had not seen much of those, she realized, but what she had seen were just the same as what she was seeing now. 

But there was something in the air.  
There was something in the way Sunshine's eyes gleamed in the colorless darkness of the House, in the way his blue irises were trained on Xion all the time, like a predator stalking a very ambitious prey, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce and maim. 

“Don't mind them, Princess,” Thirteen said, sitting down next to her on the staircase, his body warm against her shoulder, his arm heavy on her back. Kairi wanted to lean into it, almost, and if she closed her eyes she could pretend it was Riku next to her, comforting her with his silent, supportive presence.  
As usual. “They will get over it, eventually.”

“Are they even mad at each other? They seem kinda… normal,” she muttered, not making it a question but almost.  
Thirteen chuckled and nodded at her. 

“Yes they're mad. Or maybe, more like pissed? Their fights are always weird,” he said, leaning back, his arm leaving Kairi's skin. She restrained a gasp at the cold air brushing against the warmed up spot, her nightshirt doing absolutely nothing to keep the chillness away.  
But it wasn't actually cold in the House. It wasn't anything that could be explained, really, and Kairi wondered why she was even trying so hard. It wasn't like she would be asked to relate everything or anything at all, about her time in the House. 

She wasn't even sure she would ever get out of there. 

“We need to find you a weapon,” Xion said, after long moments of silence. Kairi flinched at her voice, raising her eyes to spot the girl in between shadows. 

Did it make any difference, if Xion was real or not?  
Did it make any difference at all if Kairi was just hallucinating everything? If nothing was happening and she was just sitting on a staircase in the Corner House, talking to herself, listening to whispers of wind that she translated into words only to fulfill some kind of obsession? 

“What do I need a weapon for? I don't plan to kill anyone,” she said to the girl, the delusion, the creature in front of her, so proficient in turning her own body to shadow, to mingle in the darkness like it was her natural habitat. 

“You wanna get out, you have to win the battles,” Xion said, moving a step forward, hands glistening with blue magic, a sparkle hit the wall behind her, and Sunshine yelped in pain. “If you're anything like these idiots you will start to like it, sooner or later.”

“I don't like anything about the battles, Xi,” Thirteen spat out, showing his teeth like a dog, growling deep in his throat.  
Kairi didn't know if she found it more terrifying or arousing, really.  
Naminé had the same quality of ferocity, to her, and Kairi missed her girlfriend, no matter how hurt she still was, how the betrayal stung her heart every time she thought about it. 

“Right, keep telling yourself that, Roro,” Xion hissed, a mean smile on her small mouth, and Kairi felt shivers running down her spine, wondering if they were going to jump at each other's throat, if she had to prepare to be sprayed with hot blood all over her face, if they were going to maim one another. And then, like nothing had even happened at all, Xion laughed a little, and she waved a hand in the air, the large shadows dissipating around them, the sepia lights coming back in full force, and Kairi felt like an overreacting idiot. “Prepare for the night. Lights out in an hour,” the girl said, and Thirteen nodded, like that meant something to him. 

If that was the case, Kairi didn't have the barest idea of what it could be the deeper meaning behind Xion's words, but she wasn't sure she wanted to ask.

°

_It's been three days and five hours since I've let you disappear._

°

Kairi slept well.  
It sounded absurd to her own ears, truly, but she slept so much better than she had ever done in her house, or in Naminé's bed.  
Xion had prepared a cot of blankets for her, uncomfortable and stiff and scratchy, but it was warm and it smelled nice, like they had been washed just a few hours prior. 

Kairi had dreamed, of course, because she dreamed every night and nothing had ever been strong enough or good enough to shut her brain down all the way, but her dreams had been surprisingly pleasant, compared to the nightmares that usually plagued her sleep. 

She dreamed of Riku, of Naminé, both laying on the poppies, laying together with her, braiding flowers into one another's hair, not smiling but not crying either, and that was just as well, considering the usual tones of her dreams.  
Kairi was beyond happy to see them together, happy for once, not screaming down the sky for an argument dragged out for too long.  
It was time to bury the shovel. 

The _hatchet_. Whatever that was. 

°

_Kairi, I don't think your phone is still alive, after all these days, but I wanted to let you know that we're all good out here._  
_The popo is everywhere, I'm quite sure I will find a blue-man in my ass the next time I go to the bathroom, but that's all good and fine, you know?_  
_It's not the worst thing to come out of this situation, after all._  
_Writing this is completely useless, but it feels like…_

°

_It's been two weeks and your phone must be dead by now. And maybe you're dead too, who knows. Or maybe you've found a way to escape the Corner House and Poppytown altogether and are currently tanning on some beautiful beach or something._  
_This is stupid, but I really don't know how else to talk to you._

°

_Three weeks._  
_I still want you to come back, you know? Even if you're an asshole._

°

_I miss you a lot, Kairi._

°

_If you can, please come home._

°

_These days, this is the only way I have to still talk to you. It seems unreal, you know? I still think I will see you every time I turn around._


	8. Chapter Seven

#### 

Chapter Seven

“ _So, what did_ your _therapist say, today?_ ” Naminé asked, her voice quiet and bitter over the phone, mocking. 

They didn't call each other friends, not yet, but Riku's resentment had boiled down a lot since Kairi's disappearance, just like every other emotion he used to feel before he had let her go. Before he had _broken his promise_.  
  
Naminé was nice enough to talk to him every night, a whisper of worry in her tone that she was quick to mask with indifference and hatred for the situation at hand and for the police-men who, once again, refused to believe anything they told them, and for the therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists and whomever the fuck else and for their parents too. 

Because Riku had gone down the path of apathy and Naminé down the one of hatred and anger and blatant refusal to cooperate in any way or form.  
The adults didn't listen and they wouldn't talk anymore. 

“Same bullshit as always. Yours?” 

“ _I'm trying to make her lose her mind, it's hilarious,_ ” Naminé spat out, and Riku wondered if she was gripping her sheet so tight as to risk ripping them to shreds.  
If she was crying, tears down her pale cheeks and a cruel, vicious smirk on her lips, not a trace of moisture in her voice, not a single crack showing through the brave and pissed facade she was putting on for the world to see. 

He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure about anything that involved Naminé anymore, and he was so tired of the distance between them, of all the words kept inside, all the pain that had to spill in between them before they could properly heal together. 

Kairi would have loved to know they were talking again, though, and that was probably the only reason they were talking in the first place, because respecting her memory and her wishes was the only thing they could do for her now, since they hadn't been able to protect her.  
To keep her safe.  
To keep her home. 

“ _Riku,_ ” she called him, and for only a moment, just a fleeting second, slipping through his fingers like water, her voice sounded exactly like Kairi's, and Riku could breathe. “ _You're hyperventilating,_ ” she informed him, the same casualty she put in every other statement that wasn't aimed towards some shitty adult trying to meddle with their lives. 

“Means I'm still alive, doesn't it?” he said, trying to force his throat open, his lungs to function properly. 

The house was dead silent, and Terra wasn't there.  
His father was out, maybe getting drunk off his ass just like Riku would have wanted to do, maybe praying at some shrine for a shard of peace to finally come to them, maybe simply wandering through the streets, unable to stay cooped up inside with a son who hated him. 

“ _It means you're going to pass out soon if you don't calm the fuck down. Don't make me come to you, asshole. It's cold outside,_ ” she whined, and she was probably biting her nails, making sure that no sound reached the phone, because it wasn't very appropriate for a lady to bite her nails until they bled.  
Not even for a very stressed out, very angry and very scared lady. 

“Do you think she is dead by now?”

“ _Wow, Riku, really? Could you be more of a defeatist?_ ”

“Maybe I could,” he said. It should have been a joke, but it was too real to be considered one.  
Riku had a penchant for pessimism, after all, and they all knew. “I mean, it's been a month. If she is not dead yet, she will be soon.”

“ _She is not dead. She is in the House._ ”

“Then Aqua is not dead either and Terra is not a murderer,” Riku spat out, because sooner or later it had to come up in their conversations. They couldn't continue to pretend it wasn't an argument still ongoing.  
He couldn't pretend. 

“ _Listen, Riku,_ ” Naminé started, and she sighed deep and long and loud, as if he was the most fastidious pest she had ever had to deal with. He probably was. “ _I will agree with you that your brother doesn't have anything to do with Kairi's disappearance, okay? I will concede to you on that. But Aqua… I don't think he's innocent._ ”

“Aqua was his girlfriend. He loved her. He still does.”

“ _Love is never kind, Riku,_ ” Naminé told him.  
But Riku– Riku didn't think she understood completely what she herself was saying. She had always loved Kairi and Kairi had been the kindest, the most devoted lover one could have asked for, and most perfect friend, too. 

Naminé couldn't possibly have felt any kind of rough love in her entire life, but for the one she dished out herself. 

“You don't know him like I do, Naminé,” he said, and pronouncing her name once again, and having the right to, was such a beautiful feeling, a light in the midst of all the darkness surrounding his life for the last month.  
Naminé was coming back into his life and Riku could weep at the marvel that she was. “He… He loved her in the best way.”

“ _Which way is the best to love someone?_ ” she asked, and the conversation was slowly spiraling down some kind of fucked up philosophy, but Riku didn't give a shit about that. He didn't give a shit about anything, really, not since they had taken Terra away again, since they had taken away another one of the people he needed to survive, the people he loved. 

At least – and wasn't that a very fucked up way to start a sentence? – Naminé was back with him. In a pretty weird way, full of awkwardness and silences and things unsaid. But she was there, every night, talking to him and reminding him that there were still reasons to stay alive, reasons why the world was still a beautiful place to live in. 

“Fuck if I know,” he muttered, letting himself fall down on the bed, his head hitting the pillow, his hair fluttering around his face.  
He imagined them to be red and soft and coconut-scented, for a moment, and again he could breathe.  
He could only breathe when he imagined Kairi next to him. “You tell me, you know better than me about this kinda stuff.”

“ _Not really. The only people I loved were you and Kairi and my brothers. Look at where they all are now._ ”

“You think it's on you, right? Like– like, all this shit, it's on our shoulders because we're still here and we're awake and we're not behind bars _**again**_ and…” Riku choked on his world, but only for a moment, and he thought of everyone they had lost along the way, Kairi only the last name of a too long list of people they would probably never see again, never speak to again, “It's survivor's guilt, I think. Kai said something about it just the other day…”

“ _You're hyperventilating again, you idiot,_ ” Naminé scolded him, and she was definitely crying too, now, Riku could hear it in her voice, could see it in his mind. Naminé, pretty and small, with her hair draped over her shoulder, head down with tears streaming, falling on the white bedclothes, her nightgown doing shit to protect her from the cold, goosebumps all over her arms, on her nape. 

He could see her, he didn't need to be there to know. 

In that moment, as her sobs reached him in his own room, the phone too hot in his hand, too heavy somehow, he could see her with the same clarity he had always seen Kairi.  
And Riku thought that, maybe, she could belong to him again. 

*

School was a mess.  
Yes, Naminé was there. And yes, she stood next to him, keeping a hand on his arm at any given time.  
But they didn't share any class, they were in different years, and the loneliness was taking a toll on Riku.  
Everywhere he turned, there were teenagers whispering, calling him names, bumping into him and than joking about being scared of getting killed. 

Riku had to wonder if the townspeople had done the same to Terra, before he had been taken away and put in jail.  
If so, he really wanted to murder them, to make them afraid, to teach them a lesson. It was bad enough that they were pestering Naminé, Riku couldn't stand the idea of them hurting his brother too. 

The sky was really blue that morning, and the courtyard behind the school building smelled like freshly fallen snowflakes and stale cigarette smoke.  
A few cars were approaching, parents and older siblings coming by to pick up their personal shitty teenager, and Riku watched them, waiting for Naminé to come out of her last class.  
His shoulders were straight, tense, and he hated to but he was feeling all the eyes on him, crawling on his skin and pin-pricking his nerves.  
It was awful. 

“Hey,” Naminé greeted him, appearing at his side, one of her slender hands intertwining with his own. Her gloves were really soft, woolen and white like the entirety of her outfit. “Stop letting them get to you, Riku,” she scolded after a moment, noticing how stiff his posture was, how tight the grip on her hand, how sweaty his palm, despite the cold air blowing. 

It was the middle of December and no one in the town seemed to want to celebrate the upcoming festivities.  
Riku couldn't exactly blame them for it, but they were really fine with blaming him. 

“Were it as easy as it sounds, I guess no one would ever resort to suicide,” he spat at her, glaring down at the snow covering the ground.  
He loved snow, really, and Kairi had loved snow too and that was probably the reason he felt so strongly against it, this year.  
She wasn't there to appreciate it, to throw white, fluffy and cold balls at his head, handful of flakes down his shirt, to roll around making angels with hair like blood and eyes like the most beautiful of sunsets. 

She wasn't there and Riku couldn't honestly love anything if she wasn't at his side. 

“If you're suicidal, you should tell your therapist,” Naminé said, and somehow, even under the palpable concern, she still managed to sound contemptuous. “She would be oh so thrilled to help you through it.”

“Like hell I'm going to tell her anything,” Riku mumbled, already dreading the next appointment, the next hour and a half he had to spend in front of the woman, being analyzed like some sort of fucked up and fascinating guinea pig.  
Like a pet project of hers, to save or to ruin forever, whichever one was funnier. “She would have a field day and the last thing I want is to add up to her enjoyment of life.”

“You should do like I do. Tell them all the symptoms you can think of and let them figure it out for themselves what is true and what is not.”

The thing was, probably all of the symptoms Naminé had told her therapist about were actually there, in some form or another.  
They were pretty messed up, after all. Both because the year 2006 had happened and still branded them daily, and because the light of their lives was gone and no one had the barest idea of where she might have gone. 

Riku had an idea, though. And Naminé too, and Terra.  
The only problem with that was that the adults didn't like very much where their story went, and had collectively decided not to believe one single word of it. 

“We should go look for her again,” Riku said, whispering in the now empty courtyard. There were a few curious eyes peeking at them from behind the curtains of the school windows, and Riku could feel those glares on his skin, but for once he paid them no mind. 

Did it matter at all?  
Did it matter if they thought he had killed Kairi?  
Did it matter if they thought Terra had killed the younger sister of his former, dead, girlfriend?

No.  
Nothing mattered at all, because Riku was going to the Corner House and he was going to stay there until the day he finally found Kairi.  
He was tired of losing people to that damn place. 

“We don't like the House,” Naminé said, and it wasn't a refusal.  
It wasn't.  
It was probably the most agreeable she had ever sounded. 

*

“… Would you at least look at me when I speak to you?” his father asked, and Riku laughed under his breath, glancing up from his plate. 

“Where's Terra?” he inquired. It was the only thing he bothered to say to the man.  
He didn't care if he had feelings and if said feelings were being hurt by his behavior.  
Riku needed to know where they had brought his brother. He wasn't a helpless child anymore – if he had ever been one at all – and he could help Terra get out of any sticky situation.  
They could find shelter in the Corner House, after all. It was famous for hiding people. “Where's my brother?”

“Please, Riku, not again…”

“Tell me and I will never have to ask again, dad.”

“I won't, I already made that clear,” the man said, voice raised, a hand slamming down on the table, Riku's plate clattered and he took a deep breath. He knew it would happen. He had been ready for it.  
He was frightened anyway. 

“Then we won't have any kind of conversation,” Riku told him, as flatly as he could manage. The thought of Terra, alone somewhere, maybe scared of going back to jail, made his stomach churn and his eyes burn like hell. “And sure as fuck I won't look you in the eyes. I'm currently despising you a lot, dad. A whole big lot.”

“I realized,” the man said, a harsh whisper, almost a hiss, and Riku wasn't deaf to the pain in his voice, but he didn't care either. It was just something the man had brought upon himself. 

“Good. Don't talk to me again until you're ready to tell me where Terra is.”

*

If school was a mess and the situation at home wasn't one of the brightest, Riku had only a few words to describe what it felt like to go to his mandatory appointments with Miss So-and-so. Also known as The Therapist.  
Or Your Therapist, when it was Naminé talking about her. 

“Riku, hello,” the woman greeted him, extending her hand to him. She maybe hoped he would shake it, eventually.  
Riku didn't. If he ever was to do it, it wouldn't be that day for sure. “How are you feeling?”

“Do you know where they put my brother?” Riku asked her. He always asked that, to everyone that bothered to talk to him, to every adult in his life who was _trying to help him_ without actually wanting to listen to what he had to say.  
Adults were assholes. 

“I already told you, Riku. I don't.”

“Tell me how frustrating it is to be asked the same thing again and again without anyone on the other side that believes what you tell them,” Riku deadpanned, staring straight into the woman's dark eyes.  
She looked a bit like Naoki, if nothing because they both had a nice, kind smile and long straight hair, jet black, falling down their slim shoulders.  
But Naoki was much more inclined to listen to them. As inclined to, in fact, as to be ruled out of the investigations for Kairi for being delusional.

“Do you feel frustrated?”

“Wouldn't you?”

“I would feel sad. I would be in pain if my best friend disappeared and if my brother was taken away,” the woman answered him, but it was clear that she didn't like the way the conversation was going. She tried to set it right, “But tell me what you feel.”

Riku hummed, deep in his chest the reverberations acted like a makeshift heartbeat, taking the place of what he had lost the moment he hadn't found Kairi in her room. 

It had been a month, and still she hadn't come back, she hadn't even found a way to contact him. 

“I want them back, of course,” he said, in the end, because spending an entire hour saying close to nothing was not good. Not even for him.  
He was, after all, used to Kairi's chatters and the silence made him think of death and falling leaves, for some reasons. “But I spent the last ten years of my life wanting people back. It's nothing new.”

“Are you coping in any way at all? It's not healthy to keep these kind of emotions cooped up.”

“I am… not coping, no. I don't see a reason why I should, I mean– She's gone, yes, but I know where to find her. I know I can still find her if I try hard enough. What I want to know is where they brought my brother and why they took him away from _me._ ”

“Terra is not a good influence for you. Especially so when he is the primary suspect for your best friend's disappearance,” the woman told him, her smile useless and pathetic, pitying him from her nice niche of simplicity and happiness.  
Riku was sure she had never lost anyone dear to her to the Corner House. None of the adult had, or they would know to believe him and Naminé and Terra when they told them the House was the place to look into. 

“Kairi chose to go. No one kidnapped her or took her away against her will. She chose to leave,” Riku spat out, he was unable to keep the anger out of his mouth, the desperation out of his eyes, and his tears dripped down the desktop, splattering against the glass cover in rhythmic beats. “She walked away on her own two legs. There is no one to blame but her.”

“Do you blame her for abandoning you?” the woman asked, and she was enjoying this. She was having the psychiatrist equivalent of an acid trip for a junkie, and Riku hated her a bit more than he already did.  
She looked at him and she found him interesting. A subject to study and prod with a teaser to see what kind of reaction he would have.

“I blame the House for everything that has happened to us. I love Kairi,” he said, regaining composure in every part of his person. He shouldn't have let himself go like that. It was easier for The Therapist to manipulate him into giving answers he didn't want to give if he showed emotions. 

He knew how those people worked. He remembered from his time as a naif seven-year-old. 

*

_I hope you're still alive, you asshole, because I'm coming to get you._  



	9. Chapter Eight

#### 

Chapter Eight

“This is a bad idea,” Naminé said, her mouth hidden behind her ivory scarf, hands deep into her pockets, shoulders curled down and head lowered against the merciless, frigid wind. 

The night was dark.   
Every single night was dark in Poppytown, yes, but this night in particular was darker. 

Ten years prior, this exact same day, they had been playing around in the snow in the garden in front of the old woman's house, all three of them, and Riku had gotten a runny nose out of it and Kairi an ugly cough. 

Naminé said, looking straight into his eyes for a moment, her irises shining even through the darkness, as if she didn't care, they didn't care, that it was impossible. “Possibly the worst idea you ever got.”

“You're welcome to go back home. I will bring Kairi to you once I've found her.”

“Shut your mouth, I'm still on board. But it's a fucking bad idea,” she told him, whacking him in the arm. Riku wrapped said arm around her shoulders, holding her flushed against his side, unconsciously inhaling her cold scent.   
He still missed her, even when she was standing next to him, trembling because of the chilly air against his skin, her tiny hands gripping the back of his coat, her sobs reverberating against his chest. 

Riku knew that there would be no tears on her face as she pulled away, but the sobs were there and they were unmistakeable and he still missed her even if she was there, in his arms. 

*

It wasn't like he hadn't though this was a bad idea.   
It was also the only idea he had for rescuing Kairi, honestly.

For starters, he had destroyed his father room in search of a specific kind of information.   
Then, he had stolen his father's car. It didn't matter that he didn't have his license yet, he was good enough a driver not to die on the road.   
Then, he had collected Naminé. 

And now they were outside _the_ house.   
The house Riku didn't want to enter.   
The house that not only contained his brother – which was a very big plus about the entire situation – but also contained his mother – which was an equally big minus. 

Okay, it wasn't as bad as the Corner House, but it was very close.   
Very fucking close. 

Riku might have had something against houses in general.  
Possibly.

He took out his cellphone and started typing.   
_Rescue mission step one: get Terra back._  
_Just in case you didn't know, they sent him to our mother, not jail._   
_The grown ups are assholes._

He sent the message to Kairi, of course. He always sent her texts, just in case she answered one of them, giving him some rays of hope that she was still alive and kicking. 

“I think this is stupid, just for your information,” Naminé told him. She had already let him know so many fucking times, over the journey from Poppytown to here, and he was tired to hear it, but he was also too hyped up on adrenaline to care about his own annoyance.

“I'm not going in there without solid protection and I can't think of anyone else I trust more than my own brother.” 

“I know. I understand, too. But I'm still waiting in the car. Your mom is evil and I don't want to see her,” Naminé murmured and Riku wondered how much it had cost her to spill the truth like that. About her own feeling, even. It was as close to a miracle as them puny mortals could hope to get. 

“Fine. I will brave her all on my own. Pray that I live through it,” he told her, smiling at her for the first time since their fight.   
How many years before had it been, again?  
He had forgotten. He was sure he remembered, just the other day, the exact date Naminé had broken his heart and their friendship, but in that moment it didn't come to him at all. It was like a wall was blocking his memories of that event completely.

He rang the doorbell.   
A swift glance at his wristwatch confirmed that it was definitely too fucking late at night for someone to be awake in the house, or so he hoped. The satisfaction of waking his mother up in the middle of the night was sweet under his tongue, almost making him salivate.   
It was nothing, compared to what the woman had done to him and Terra, but it was something. A start, so to speak, not that he had any intention of spending any time at all planning revenge on her or anything like that. He had an actual life to live.

He waited only a minute before jabbing his finger at the doorbell again. And this time he was brutal, letting the chime go on and on and on for at least forty seconds, and by then, he didn't need to keep it going since his mother had appeared in front of him.  
She was…  
Older. A whole fucking lot older, with lines all over her face and a popping back that she arched looking at him.

“I suppose your father has no idea that you're here,” she said, voice mumbled and rough from sleep.

“I want to see Terra,” Riku told her, going to the point since he had no intention whatsoever to waste time making small talk with his mother and also because he had other things burning on the stove. If that was even the right metaphor for the situation he was currently in. He didn't know. He didn't even care.

“Yeah, sure, go see the murderer. Not like I give a shit about my baby boy getting maimed or anything,” she drawled on, blocking his way.

Riku's eyes tainted in red, and he was ready to spit venom at any moment, but Terra interrupted him.

“I didn't kill you, why would I hurt Riku? I actually love him, you know?” his brother said, some kind of fake nonchalance coating his voice. It had been three weeks since Riku had seen him last, and hearing his voice was so good.   
So perfect.   
He pushed his mother out of the way and run into his brother's arms, snuggling tight against him and breathing in his scent.   
God, how he had missed him. It was cruel how his parents had took Terra away from him after so little since his return home.   
Cruel and inhumane.

“We're going away. Right now,” Riku whispered in Terra's shirt, making fists around the fabric covering his brother's back and forcing himself to keep the tears at bay. 

Terra's hand ran through his hair and Riku wanted to hug him even tighter, but there was no time to waste on affection, no matter how he craved it.   
They had to get going.   
They had to go back to Poppytown.   
They had to get into the Corner House.  
They had to find Kairi.

“Okay,” Terra said. And then he repeated, “okay.” A whisper full of desperate hope and longing.  
Full of finality.  
Riku knew his brother wasn't going to be happy about the plan, but he couldn't bring himself to worry about it in that moment.

“One would think that not seeing one another for ten years would have made you awkward around each other,” their mother commented, tying up her long, silver hair in a messy bun not so different from Riku's own. She gave out a dark chuckle, before adding, “Instead you're more eager than ever to be up in each other's space. Never could rid you of that codependency thing you got going on.”

“We never asked you to,” Riku snapped at her, disentangling himself from Terra and pulling him lightly over the door.   
Being the attentive planner he was, he had packed a change of clothes for his older brother. He didn't care if Terra was okay getting out in a tank top in the November climate, he wasn't going to let him stay in his pajamas. 

“Your father wont be happy when he sees him,” the woman said, hip leaning against the doorway, a cigarette in between her lips. She was watching them leave and she didn't give a fuck about them or their safety and Riku felt somewhat validated in his hatred. 

What really stung worst of everything else was, she had been a good mother; before their lives collectively went to shit, she had been loving and caring and tender with them. She had been the best mother Riku could have asked for. 

“Good thing we aren't going back home, then,” he spat back at her, meeting her teal eyes one last time behind his shoulder and gripping Terra's hand harder.  
  
He didn't need a mother. He was old enough to take care of himself.   
And even if at seven years old he hadn't been, there had been his father, back then, to help him along the way.   
He didn't need a mother. But that didn't mean he didn't miss having one. 

He let Terra go only when they were at the car, and he hurried at getting back inside the warm cubicle. Naminé was staring at him with kind eyes, still gleaming despite everything, despite the darkness.  
He didn't know if he was supposed to love or hate his girls and their magical eyes, really. 

“If we're not going home, where are we going?” his brother asked him as Riku turned the keys in the ignition. He sighed, deep and long, and he eyed Terra in the mirror. 

“To the Corner House. We're getting Kairi back,” he told him.   
Terra gnawed at his lower lip for a few moments, brows furrowed, and then he nodded, just once, and his gray irises met Riku's cyan ones. 

*

_This will be the last text for a while. If you're not dead, I swear I'm going to find you, no matter how long it takes me._

*°*

Kairi didn't think it was fair of her to be crying over Riku's texts, not when she was purposefully not replying to them, but her eyes were still teary, no matter how preposterous and unfair and selfish it felt.   
She had always been a sucker for her best friend's pain, and she couldn't stand the anguish she felt in his written words. He was just so fucking transparent, even via text, and she could literally read all that he was going through. 

She could also argue, maybe reaching a little, that it was not completely her fault if Riku was going through a shitty period of time.   
She didn't have any part in accusing Terra of her own disappearance and she had left so many damn clues about where she was, it was pathetic how no one had yet bothered to search the Corner House for her presence. Or her body, at the very least, since it would have appeared they were all dead bent on considering her a goner. 

“Time flows differently in here, doesn't it?” she asked Xion. The girl stopped watering the plants in her room and glared at Kairi, letting the dark blue can clang against the windowsill.   
Outside there were the poppy fields, Kairi could still see them, red and in bloom like she had left them in November.   
But it wasn't November anymore, outside of the House, right?  
Riku had said it had been three weeks, already.   
Maybe a month, by now.

“I can recall the twins telling you I was born here, why do you think I know anything about the outside world?” Xion snapped at her, putting her fists on her hips, her pose almost fake in all the tension she was putting in it, all the effort. 

“But you know how the House works better than anyone else.”

“Not in correlation with what's out there, though,” the girl whispered, and her small voice ran down Kairi's spine like a shock of thunder.   
She wondered if she would ever become such a pro at whispering. Maybe with time and a lot of training. Or maybe not, maybe it was one of those kind of abilities that could only get passed down to you via genetic code and never learned. “I don't know anything about your world except from what the other players told me, I'm sorry.”

“No need to apologize, Xion, really. I am sorry for, you know– assuming you knew,” Kairi told her.   
She wondered where her new 'friends' had gone, why they had left in the middle of Kairi's nap without even bothering to say goodbye. Not that she had any right to demand attentions or anything, but they had both seemed nice and friendly and she had thought that maybe… 

Who knew, really?  
She herself didn't know what she had thought about Sunshine and Thirteen. It wasn't like thy were actual friends or anything. No. The only actual friends she had, she had left in Poppytown, abandoning them to their own devices. 

“Listen, Princess,” Xion started, moving small steps in her direction. Kairi perked up, her back snapping straight up. She wasn't a fighter, and she had no way at all to defend herself from Xion's freaky magical attacks – that were probably all part of her delusions – but she wasn't going down without a fight. “I'm shit at talking about feelings, but I know it's never easy for you rookies, at first. I swear it will get better, you only have to give it some time.”

“So, um… You're not going to– no, you're obviously not going to,” Kairi muttered to herself, feeling shame rising in her cheeks, warming her entire face up. 

“Are you afraid? Of me!?” Xion asked, eyes wide, and she took a step back, restoring the initial distance in between them. “I… Should I apologize for scaring you? I don't know what I did to make you afraid in the first place, so maybe apologizing is not the best thing I could do.”

“No, no. You're– You're okay, you're fine. You didn't do anything, it's me… I'm a little wary of people,” Kairi reassured her, waving her hands too much in the air and making a fool of herself.   
Well, her words weren't lies, that was a point in her favor. She hated people who got too close to her, it made her feel suffocated. She hated strangers, actually, and not all people, because she could never hate Riku or Naminé, no matter their hypothetical crimes. 

“I understand, Princess and I'm not trying to start a fight or anything, but yesterday you seemed perfectly comfortable in the presence of the twins.”

“Yeah, uh…” Kairi chuckled under her breath and her face was in flames. She was burning in shame and she had no way to escape. “It doesn't happen all the time,” she said in the end, lamely, but it still wasn't untruthful.   
She guessed it also depended on the attitude of the other person in question. Because Sunshine had been super friendly with her, and Thirteen too, albeit in a much quieter way, and she had felt at ease next to them.   
Xion, on the other hand, was twitchy and creepy and aggressive and Kairi had a hard time getting relaxed next to the girl. 

“Would it make you feel better if I swore on my own heart that I will never hurt you?” Xion asked her. Kairi stared, her eyes lingering for a moment too long, and the girl's cheeks glowed pink. “Not even jokingly like I do sometimes with the twins,” she added, as if it was barely an afterthought.

Kairi knew Xion was a dangerous creature. She could throw balls of light from her hand and said balls looked like they hurt pretty bad upon contact.   
The twins were dangerous too, she had no doubt whatsoever about it. Their deadliness was palpable in the way they born themselves.   
Short of making one predator and pray metaphor too much, Kairi had no way to describe how they felt to her.

“It's okay, really,” she forced herself to say, after too many seconds had gone by in silence, “you don't have to swear an oath or anything. I'm sure that in a few days I'll be much more comfortable around you.”

°

The blood was everywhere and Sunshine was cursing down the roof, moving frantically all over the place, hands shaking like leaves, like the earth during a quake, goldfishes out of the water. 

“They could all die for all that I care!” he was screaming at Xion, and Kairi didn't know what he meant but it didn't sound okay by anyone's standards. “Heal him.”

Thirteen was heaving hard breaths, curled up on the floor, and Kairi would have gone to kneel next to him, maybe to comb his hair out of his face with her fingers, maybe to try and soothe the pain as much as she could, but Sunshine was stalking the perimeter around his twin's body and it seemed like a really bad idea to get too close to them. 

“Why don't you do it? Why do I always have to be the one with their blood on my hands?” Xion spat back at him, arms crossed on her chest. She didn't look intimidating, but Kairi could feel her aura even from the other end of the room. 

“Heal him first and then we can have how many arguments about the morality of these things as you want,” Sunshine said, and beyond the growling of his words, he sounded broken and worried and guilty, maybe, if Kairi was reading him right. 

“I don't want to taint myself anymore than I already have. Not even for you,” Xion said, whispered. And maybe she was feeling guilty too, or maybe Kairi was projecting her own emotions on the people around her. She was known to do that, if one were prone to listening to her psychiatrist. “You're on your own this time.”

“You can't be serious, Xion! You know I can't heal him,” Sunshine cried out, stopping in his relentless tracks, tears streaming down his face, his skin taking on a fairly ashen quality, his eyes burning shinier in the darkness of the room.   
A breath moved Kairi's hair away from her face and she knew, somehow, that the place was becoming a battleground and that Xion and Sunshine were going to hurt themselves and one another. “Please.”

“Can't you be grateful that you've had him for so long, already? Do you think everyone is as lucky as you? Don't you think the time you've been able to spend together is already enough?” Xion asked, but there was no fire and no fight in her voice. Kairi had the distinct impression she was intruding into a very deep and private conversation. 

“I'm an entitled asshole, I already know that. Everybody knows that. But I know you love him too, Xion. Please don't let him die only because you're angry at me.”

Xion sighed, but she also moved quickly towards Thirteen's body. She dropped on her knees not even flinching when her kneecaps hit the hard ground with a loud clacking sound.   
A bright light surrounded her hands and she started murmuring words under her breath that, to Kairi, sounded like prayers.   
Xion looked like a devotee, like a young priestess in front of an altar, and Sunshine was the God guiding her hand.


	10. Chapter Nine

#### 

Chapter Nine

Naminé coughed again, leaning heavily against her seat, a deep, pained sigh leaving her lips as the coughs subsided. 

“Are you okay?” Riku asked her, pointless as it was. She was not okay, he could see that perfectly well on his own, but she didn't even look on her way to death, and if she felt like that he would have actually wanted to know. 

“Yes. It's just a cold,” she snapped at him, voice feeble and coarse. An unwilling whisper. 

“Do you want to switch with Terra? You could lay down and sleep in the back.”

“It's fine,” she said. 

Riku waited a moment, stealing a glance in her way, and then he asked, “ _It's fine_ as in you want to switch or _it's fine_ as in _you should mind your own business, shut up and keep your eyes on the road_?”

“You should always mind your own business. As a general rule,” Naminé murmured, and even if it didn't sound like a joke, Riku had the suspicion it was supposed to be one. “But I meant it as _it's fine, I can stay here, I'm not in too bad a shape_.”

*

Naminé had been asleep for three hours, laid out on the backseat, her light snores offering a nice background sound that was sweeter on Riku's mind than the motor of the car rumbling all around him. 

The trip from his mother's house – all the way out far into the city, in some hidden corner of the Hoster suburbs – to Poppytown was long and boring. Mainly interstate roads and splattered in tunnels here and there that crossed the mountains. 

Riku didn't like the world outside of Poppytown. He had been born there and his town had always been the only thing he had known. 

That was not to say that he liked the world _inside_ of Poppytown. Not at all, actually, but it was familiar and, in a way, Riku valued familiarity more than likeability. 

“The Corner House is a dangerous place, Riku,” Terra said, voice lower than ever to not disturb the sleeping beauty riding in the car with them, expression meek and somber, eyes hardened in the thousand lights coming in from the road. “How many chances do I have to change your mind?”

“Zero,” Riku told him, managing to find the decency to feel guilty and ashamed for it. “Kairi is in there.”

“Don't think I don't appreciate the love you have for her. This is not me trying to tell you to forget about your best friend or anything. I'm just worried for you.” 

“I know. I'm worried for me too. For us. And for Kairi.” He took a curve tighter than necessary and one of the wheels whined loudly. He breathed harder, for a moment, and steered himself, reminding his body that no matter how much adrenaline was pumping in his veins, there was no logical reason why he should or could kill all of them off in a car accident. Not even if it would have made everything easier for everyone involved in this clusterfuck of a situation. 

Terra murmured, “You told me you weren't doing anything dangerous.” And Riku heard all the pain in those words. It cut, deep and blistering and cold as ice. “I wanted to believe it for a little longer.”

“Kairi is my priority.”

“And that's beautiful,” Terra said, nodding slowly, “but your own safety should matter a little more to you than it does.” 

Riku let those words swim around in his head for a while, thinking about his entire life in under two minutes. It was no small feature. “I do care about my safety,” he said in the end, but it sounded weird and stilted in his own ears. “I just care about her more,” he added, because it made a lot more sense than leaving half of the statement unsaid and unheard.

“It's–” Terra choked only a little. “It's really noble of you. You're a good person, Riku, and I'm proud. I just wish you could care for her without putting yourself in danger.” 

*

The rising sun found them still on the road.   
Naminé didn't know how to drive – and, anyway, she was asleep – but Terra did and sometimes around four in the morning he had switched places with Riku to let him sleep off the adrenaline drop that had made him jumpy as hell and had left him shaky like a leaf. 

Riku hadn't slept much, though. Maybe two hours, maybe less.   
When the sun peeked through the clouds, irradiating his face and stinging his eyes, Riku was already awake, but Naminé wasn't. 

He couldn't really shut up that part of his brain that feared she would end up just like her brother. That she would simply never open her eyes again and he would end up every month, always the same day, visiting her not-quite-corpse.   
But no, Naminé would wake up. She was probably catching up on all the sleep she had lost during the month Kairi had been missing, and the cold and the lulling motions of the car were probably helping her staying under the spell of sleep. 

“We're stopping for breakfast. There should be a diner around here, somewhere,” Terra informed him. That sounded quite right.   
No, it sounded like the best fucking idea since toothpaste had been invented, actually.   
Riku was starving. 

*

Inside the diner, the air was hot and smelled like food. Riku's stomach grumbled, impatient, and he read the menu faster than ever.   
At his side, Terra was playing with an empty container of napkins, the hard plastic tumbling rhythmically against the table top. 

“Will you stop that?” Naminé snapped at him, brushing hair out of her face. She was sitting right in front of Riku, and he could see the red of her eyes, equal parts tiredness and cold-induced tears. 

“What can I bring you?” a waiter asked them. His hair was long, longer than Riku's, and carefully tied in a bun on top of his head. “”Have you chosen yet?”

“A coffee and some pancakes for me, please,” Terra answered, incredibly polite.   
Riku wasted a moment too long to stare at his brother. There was nothing honest in Terra's carefully neutral expression.   
Nobody knew them, on that interstate, and the news barely covered what went down in Poppytown, so small as it was. Nobody knew that Terra was an ex-con and currently primary suspect of murder – at worst – and kidnapper – at best – and his brother seemed intent on making it stay like that. 

“Sure,” the waiter said, scribbling the order on a notepad. He then looked at Riku and Naminé, waiting patiently.   
Riku supposed, knowing himself as well as he did, he could never work in retail. He hated putting on fake politeness and a kind voice. He wasn't cut to deal with people. 

“The same for me,” Naminé said, eventually. Riku wondered if he was dissociating, because the time was simultaneously static and flying past him. It was unreal. 

“Me too,” he told the waiter, because he didn't remember anything he had read on the menu and his stomach couldn't decide on anything it wanted to eat, after all.   
Nothing he could have ordered in a diner, anyway. He was daydreaming of his mother's stew and his father's favorite pizza, with toppings he hated with a passion but still ate the leftover slices of, the morning after, before going to school.   
Or maybe he was simply trying to find excuses to think about his parents and the food he associated with them seemed like the safest option. 

He wondered if he would ever see them again. 

The food came to them after a long stretch of silence. Or a short stretch. Time was still being capricious to Riku and he couldn't seem to remember he had a phone in his pocket that could tell him exactly how many minutes had passed since they had set foot inside the diner. 

The pancakes were spongy and delicious, melted butter covering them generously and drowning in maple syrup. Riku tore through them like he hadn't eaten anything in the past month. Maybe he hadn't, not really. Not substantially. He had had a weird, irregular schedule since the day Kairi had disappeared, both in sleep and in nutrition, and he didn't blame himself for the ferocity he reserved to his plate.

When he finally managed to take his cup, the coffee was tepid and unsatisfying, but he drank it anyway.

“Are you okay?” Terra asked him, touching his arm with trembling fingers. Or maybe it was Riku that was shaking, he couldn't tell. 

“Sure,” he reassured his brother, sitting up straighter in his seat, back touching the orange plastic, finding only the littlest bit of comfort coming from it. It was real in a way time and thoughts weren't being, in that moment. 

Maybe it was still the drop from adrenaline, maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the entire situation, his entire life.   
Riku didn't know, nor did he care.   
The one certainty he had was that he wasn't okay by any means. He was having an attack of some sorts, an episode of some undiagnosed mental illness, or physical illness. His heart started beating faster, and then it stopped, almost, and Riku didn't understand if he was just confounding himself with all the thinking he was doing. 

“Riku,” Naminé whispered at him, calling his name in a way she hadn't done for _years_. “Whatever's going on in your head, stop it,” she ordered him, staring hard into his eyes. He focused on her blue irises, light and shiny and red rimmed and beautiful. He thought of Kairi and the Corner House, and his hand found Terra's under the table and he gripped tight. 

“Sorry,” he told her, but he didn't feel sorry and he wasn't sure he could stop whatever was going on in his head. He wasn't even sure if there was actually something going on. Something different than normal. “I'm just tired.”

“Bullshit,” Naminé and Terra said at the same time, in the same worried tone, and Riku wondered if that was how Kairi had always felt, whenever they worried about her, and if it was, he felt incredibly sorry for putting such an ugly feeling on her already burdened shoulders. 

There was no need for his brother and Naminé to worry about him. If he was broken he would pick himself together in a few minutes, as usual – if anything was usual at all, in what he was going through – and if he wasn't broken then he was fine and there was no reason to be concerned, was there?

Terra paid, exchanging quiet, small talk with the woman at the register. She was just old enough to give Riku and Naminé both the creeps.   
Who could blame them for their repulsion for old people, though?  
He wondered if the woman who had kept them from their families ten years prior was okay. If she was still alive, if she ever thought about them and if she ever planned her revenge in that little moldy house of hers. 

“Let's go. We have still a few hours to drive,” Terra told them, wrapping an arm around Riku's shoulders. He snuggled close to his brother, nestled and protected in his shadow. He could have fallen asleep there, if he hadn't been required to walk to the car. 

“I can take first turn,” he offered, but Terra waved a dismissive hand towards him. 

“Don't trust you behind the wheel like that,” his brother told him, sounding much kinder than his words actually were. Or were they?  
Was it worry? Concern? Was it spite, mockery?  
Riku had to confess, at least to himself, that he didn't know Terra enough to read too deep in his tone. 

Terra wasn't easy to understand like Kairi was. Like Naminé was.   
He was much more sly with his honesty, keeping it hidden and feeding the world only the barest bits, to keep it going but never satisfied.   
Riku was pretty sure he wasn't projecting on his brother, but he might have. It was something he was renowned to do.   
He could project his existential crisis on a rock and prove to hell and back and everyone around him that said rock was sinking into despair. 

*°*

“Care to explain what was going on?” Kairi asked Xion once she was sure they were alone, Sunshine and Thirteen gone off somewhere to sleep away the traumatic experience. 

Well it had been traumatic for Kairi, but maybe it was a normal occurrence for the people in the Corner House. 

“No,” the girl said, and she was trembling hard, shaking like an earthquake. 

“I'm here,” Kairi said, but it didn't make any sense as a statement on its own, so she added, “I'm in the House too, I have the right to know how this place works. Especially if it's such a controversial thing.” Her voice came easy from her lips and she wondered why she couldn't make an argument all in one piece. She had to shed some reservations she had. 

“You're a player only in theory. You don't even have a weapon yet. It will take a while before you enter the Battlefield proper.”

“Wouldn't it be better to make me enter it with some kind of deeper knowledge about what I'm getting into? What I already got myself into? Because _you_ asked me to help and I came but now you are not using me to help. You're not even telling me things I think I'm supposed to know.” 

“Do you have any living relative, Princess?” Xion asked, and it sounded like a change in topic but maybe it wasn't if Kairi was to give any meaning to the girl's somber expression. 

“Yes,” she answered. Her dad, and her mom too. They were alive. And maybe Aqua was, too. She didn't know. She couldn't believe anything she had ever thought was true. She couldn't very well believe Terra had killed her sister, not when he had insisted over and over about Aqua being in the House.   
Not when Kairi knew that it was possible for Aqua to be in the House and for the policemen to not have found her body anyway. 

“Do you love them?” Xion inquired, staring straight into Kairi's eyes, only for a moment. 

“Yes,” Kairi told her, feeling shivers on her nape, tap-dancing on her skin. 

“Then don't get hurt.” 

“That doesn't line up,” Kairi lamented.

“For you, maybe,” Xion snapped at her. She wasn't watering plants in that moment. She was staring at flowerpots with intricate decors and even more intricate flowers inside. “For us it makes perfect sense.”

“You want me to just– just take that at face value without even explaining to me?”

“I'm tired. Really, really tired. Let's move this conversation to another time,” Xion whispered, but Kairi didn't want to move the conversation to another time. She didn't want to move the conversation at all. She wanted answers. 

“Let's not,” she said, shaking her head. “I only need, like, ten words out of your mouth. You can't be too tired for that.”

“You will ask so many questions, Princess, so many.” Xion sighed and she didn't look resigned, but she didn't look angry at Kairi either. She just looked tired.

“I swear I won't. You explain what happened, I let you go and if I have question I'm gonna bring them up to Sunshine tomorrow.”

“To heal you a Caster steals shards of life from your living relatives,” Xion said with the voice of someone bracing themselves for a very long and very taxing conversation, but Kairi kept her word. 

°*°

Poppytown was even colder than the interstate.   
The endless fields helped in making the town a sheltered refrigerator, and Riku shivered in his coat. It didn't mattered that he had three layers of wool and two of cotton on his skin, he was freezing and his teeth chattered.   
On any other time, he would have found it a relieve. Hypothermia hadn't kicked in, yet, and he was probably going to keep all his fingers attached to his body and functional, but in that moment he longed for a hot bath and a cup of steaming cocoa – the kind only Naoki could make to perfection – and possibly a few days of uninterrupted rest.   
He supposed he deserved that, at the very least. 

In the light of day, they didn't dare to venture in the town proper. They parked the car in the fields and moved from there. Naminé leading in a merciless march of pure focus.   
But Riku couldn't do the resolution she could, and he picked his phone out of his pocket, swearing to himself he was going to text Kairi just one last time.   
One last time before he gave up his life completely to save a dickhead who couldn't even hold on long enough to let him save her from herself.

_One last text, Kai. One last text before I enter the Corner House. Willingly. For you._  
_Have you noticed I always do the shittiest things for you? Because I noticed. I noticed a lot and I really hate you and myself both for this._  
_(I don't really hate you, though. I just miss you so much. Hating you comes easier, lately. I think Nami thinks the same, but you should probably ask her for confirmation. I renounced my Naminé Expert badge, after all)_

“You said you weren't doing anything dangerous,” Terra repeated, and Riku noticed what were possibly tears in his voice. Or maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was Naminé who had infected him with her germs.  
Or they were actually tears, because Terra was a good brother and he cared for Riku. Had always cared for Riku, even miles away and locked up. 

“Did you ask dad not to bring me with?” Riku asked, ignoring his brother's words completely. He had already explained himself thoroughly and he knew he understood his reasons. Terra was probably tasting how bitter denial was.   
Bitter and useless.   
Kind of like Riku himself.   
“To the prison,” he added as the silence stretched on between them.   
He stole a glance at his phone screen, the message still only half written, waiting for his focus to return, for Terra to say something. 

“Yes.”

“Thanks. Misplaced worry and opposite results to what you surely wanted to accomplish. Don't do that again.”

“Excuse me?” Terra asked, turning just a little to stare at him. The sun was cold, and sooner or later they would step in the House's shadow. Riku looked forward, Naminé was a spot of white in the red fields and she looked angelic and righteously furious. She missed wings, though. 

“Don't keep me away from the people I love again, Terra,” he said, eventually meeting his brother's cold eyes. “I know you did it to protect me and I appreciate it. I know you worry about me endlessly, maybe because I'm the only person you have left whom you care for, or maybe because I've always been loyal to you. And I know you were trying to spare me the cruel realities of the world. But don't try to shut me out again.”

“You're my brother.” For a moment, the statement didn't mean much to Riku, since he had spoken words without thinking too much about them as he was prone to do in highly stressful situation, but finally it clicked in his head and he gave Terra a warm smile, his hand reaching beside him to squeeze his brother's one. 

“Blood is not everything,” he murmured, and he didn't leave time for Terra to get offended by his words or to misunderstand him, “but for us it's enough.”


	11. Chapter Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Suicidal ideation or suicidal thoughts. I don't think this will a recurring theme for the story so, for now, I will not add it to the tags, but this may be subject to changes.  
> And also, mention of a panic attack.

#### 

Chapter Ten

_One last text, Kai._ Riku wrote. Oh, how she wished this time it would be the truth. That this time his self-imposed detachment would stick. _One last text before I enter the Corner House. Willingly. For you._  
_Have you noticed I always do the shittiest things for you? Because I noticed. I noticed a lot and I really hate you and myself both for this._  
_(I don't really hate you, though. I just miss you so much. Hating you comes easier, lately. I think Nami thinks the same, but you should probably ask her for confirmation. I renounced my Naminé Expert badge, after all)_  
_I wish you had waited for me. Aren't we supposed to be best friends? Why would you go in there alone?_ As if that wasn't the question Kairi asked herself day after day. Or, well, minute after minute. It was hard to comprehend how time flowed in the Corner House, if it moved at all, if she wasn't stuck in some kind of static piece of impossibility.  
_You made me break my promise. The blame is on you, I hope you understand this, because when I finally find you I will be very pissed._  
_I told you you didn't have to go if you didn't want to. I am left to guess that you did want to._ _That you purposefully got away from us. You're a dipshit and I will personally bury your corpse someday._  
_With a shovel._

Kairi muffled a wet laugh in the collar of her pink shirt. Riku's anger burned and hurt, but she could understand it perfectly well. She was angry at herself too. She hated herself too, for not being strong enough, sane enough, normal enough.  
She hated herself for leaving and for making him break his promise and for making him promise her anything in the first place.  
They didn't do promises and oaths. They took care of each other in different ways, in subtle glances, in fairly timed touches, in whispers and jokes too heavy on the heart and not heavy enough on the throat. 

She hated everything about the situation, everyone involved, too.  
She didn't want to do anything to change it, though. She needed to help Xion. She needed to be in the Corner House.  
She needed to do this – whatever _this_ was – and only after that she could go back home. 

°

“Can you keep people outside these parts of the House?” Kairi asked Thirteen.  
He had recovered without a hitch, as if he had never been hurt and bleeding at all, and Kairi didn't really want to think about it, or about Thirteen's still living relatives. 

“Maybe Xi can,” he mumbled. He was staring hard, harder than Kairi deemed necessary, to his brother and Xion talking, just at the opposite end of the hallway.  
She could almost hear his thoughts, so loud as they were. “Who do you want to keep out?”

“My friends. I care about them too much to let them come in here.”

“If the House wants them…” Thirteen said, waving a hand in what should have been a meaningful gesture. Kairi knew he meant it as a meaningful gesture. Sadly, though, the _meaning_ part escaped her altogether.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she told him. Except, Thirteen wasn't talking at all. He was gesturing and she lacked the means to understand that vague language, that half-assed non-explanation.  
She wondered if, maybe, Thirteen purposefully ignored the fact that she had not been spending a lot of time in the House. She had been there for maybe three days. Barely over a month, if she were to believe Riku's texts.  
Still not enough to know how the place worked.

“If the House wants them, the House will have them,” Sunshine finished for his brother, plopping down on the floor next to Kairi, breath just the littlest bit short and puffy, hair a mess and clothes rumpled. His shoulder was bleeding through and past his short sleeve. She guessed he wouldn't ask to get that healed. Not via magic, anyway. “You can't keep them out, you can't get them out if they get in.”

“Is there a way to try?” 

Sunshine stopped his obnoxious playing with his necklace and looked at her from under his lashes.  
She could have called his eyes soulful, maybe, in another world where shitty things didn't happen to young people like them.  
They were big and adorably round and shiny like stars and blue like the purest seawater. 

They were dark, too. 

Sunshine cracked a smile so big his cheeks had to hurt. “You're even more mental than Xi if you think you can do anything the House doesn't want you to do,” he said, and it might have been offensive, if it had come from another's mouth, it might have been a blow on Kairi's already sensitive nerves, but it actually wasn't.  
He was probably just disillusioned, after spending who even knew how long in this fucking place. He wasn't trying to rile her up – Sunshine wasn't Riku – but merely hiding his failures and hopelessness under a scathing mask. Kairi could respect that as a coping mechanism. She was prone to use it too, more often than not. 

“I'm a fucking nutcase,” she told him, letting her shoulders straighten and then slump again as she realized she didn't have to put so much effort in her own facade. “Tell me if I can try.” 

“You can do what you want, Princess!” Sunshine beamed, almost shouted, his voice echoing in the hallway. Xion looked at them and shook her head, briskly walking away.  
Kairi knew she wouldn't go far. She had the distinct impression Xion was _never_ too far. 

“The House is awful but it's also freedom in a lot of ways,” Thirteen grumbled. Kairi wondered if it hurt him more saying those words or the wounds of the night before. 

“Not that we wouldn't trade it for the outside world in a heartbeat,” Sunshine added, while his brother slowly nodded, even before he heard the words. Kairi really envied their synchronicity.  
She thought of Aqua. 

Would they have been like them? Would they have been able to finish each other's sentences? Know what the other would say even before hearing her talk?  
Kairi craved to know, she needed to know, how she would have loved her sister, how they would have interacted, in later years.

“How were your lives?” Kairi asked in a small voice. She had gathered names were important and to keep secret, but was the same with everything else?  
Where the people in the House not supposed to know one another? “Before you came here…” she specified, even if she wasn't sure it was necessary.

“What lives?” Sunshine asked, throwing his hands in the air and following that jerky move with a much more fluid gesture, bringing his hands behind his head and laying down on the floor with a huffing breath.  
Kairi could smell the blood pouring from his wound. 

“We have been here forever,” Thirteen said, not quite morose about it, but surely not happy.  
Kairi supposed there wasn't much to be happy about. The only people happy inside the Corner House were those too unhinged to understand how fucked up everything was. 

°*°

Riku stepped inside first.  
He put a hand on Terra's shoulder and kept him still with a glare before crossing the doorway into the Corner House.  
It was obviously warmer, his chilled skin languishing in the reprieve from the biting wind.  
He didn't expect to find her there, of course not.  
He wasn't even a hopeful person in his day to day life, let alone in dire situations, and he wasn't naif enough to think it would have been so easy as step in, get Kairi, step out. 

A heavy, disappointed sigh escaped his lips anyway and he was a fucking idiot. He told himself as much, wanting to get a punch in the arm for his silly wishes and not getting it, because the only person who touched him was Kairi and she. Was. Not. There. 

His next breath, when it came, was wet with barely restrained tears. He didn't even know what stung more, the frustration or the tiredness, he just wanted everything to be over. 

' _Suicide over or normal over?_ ' the Therapist would have asked, because of course she would have asked that, if he had bothered to tell her such an ill-born thing.  
Therapists, he had rediscovered, were not the gentle kind of people, when it came to picking apart every statement their patients made.  
They could never let it pass, unnoticed and heavy, they could never forgive a bitter, inappropriate word. 

And Riku really wouldn't have know how to respond to a question like that because he didn't know.  
God, he didn't even know.  
Suicide wasn't an option, there were too many things to do, too many plans, a promise too much to set right.  
But he wasn't talking – he wasn't asking himself with someone else's voice – of options. He was talking of wishes, impossible and unreal and never-doable wishes that he could do nothing with. 

Suicide wasn't an option, not in his book, not in this moment, but he had though it would be much easier if he could just take his life away, say goodbye and let someone else deal with all the shit that was his life. 

_Normal over_ was stupid. It was just as impossible as the other option, but it was also indulgent in such a fantastical way that Riku hated himself even for daring just thinking about it.  
Normal wasn't for him.  
Normal had not been for him since 2006 had rolled around. 

“Fucking winter,” Naminé spat out, bristling at his left, and Riku jumped out of his skin at the sound of her voice. 

“What the fuck?” he said, glaring at her so hard he could have probably born holes through her infinite layers of sweaters and shirts. “I told you to wait outside.”

“It was fucking cold and it doesn't even matter. I'm as much at risk outside with your killer brother as I am in here with the killer house.”

“You don't have to pretend you think him guilty anymore, you know? I won't hold it against your pride if you fucking change your mind after three fucking years,” he hissed at her, wanting to shake her by the shoulders, to make her see the truth, the easiest path, the road to fix their friendship once and for all.  
And, who knew, they could have even come back together stronger than ever.  
They could have even become inseparable.

“Who says I'm pretending?” she asked, raising a perfectly trimmed eyebrow. It was almost invisible against her pale skin. 

“As you wish, then,” Riku said, waving a hand at her dismissively.  
He didn't have the strength to care, right now. He didn't have the strength to do much of anything that wasn't sleeping his ass off for at least twelve hours straight. What a pity, that he could not even blink his eyes willingly, while stuck inside the Corner House. 

“So we wait?” Terra asked as soon as the silence had stretched enough to surpass the awkward stage and ventured into tension. 

“You want to explore it?” Naminé retorted, as if it was a challenge and she had no intention to step down.  
Except, Terra wasn't challenging anyone, let alone _her_. 

“Chill,” Riku told her, glaring into her eyes and making sure all his displeasure was plenty clear despite how soft his voice sounded.  
She was free to hate Terra in her own time, when neither him nor his brother were around to hear it. He turned to look at Terra and, just as softly, he continued talking, “We wait, yes. See if something happens.”

“Something has already happened,” Terra murmured, casting a closed off look at Riku, his fists clenching and unclenching almost mechanically, hard and possibly painful. “What if nothing comes?” he asked after a beat, and his voice sounded a lot clearer, which made Riku think that probably his brother didn't mean for them to hear his first sentence. 

“If nothing comes, we search the first floor. If there's nothing there either, we go to sleep.”

“And where do you plan to do that? I forbid you to sleep in here,” Naminé spat out, unconsciously gripping his forearm, nails sinking in the sleeve of his coat. Riku could taste the worry in her voice, in her widened eyes, in the stiffness of her small shoulders. 

Naminé had always been a bruiser caretaker. If she loved you, you had bruises and scratches and possibly a headache from her screaming.  
Naminé was cold, had been for ten years, but she was a burning kind of cold.  
Her concern was rough, and raw, and painful; her love was terrifying.  
Those whom were hers were usually safe only until the moment she started to be afraid for them.

And Riku, apparently, still were counted amongst those ranks.  
Glad warmth spread in his chest. 

“Naoki's house,” he told her, trading lightly and carefully as his hand slipped on top of hers, dwarfing it and covering it completely. He gave a little squeeze and she relented her death grip, their eyes locked, chained to the other's ones, unblinking.  
Naminé took too long to calm down and Terra was glaring and growling quietly in his throat by the time Riku approached him. 

His brother took the last step separating them, forcing Riku to stop in his track, and his hands were on his arm, pushing up the sleeve with manic quickness, almost bordering on hysterical.  
“She didn't hurt me,” Riku murmured, letting out a slow breath and gracelessly flopping against his brother's chest.  
Terra wasn't even taken aback. He was ready for it as if he had seen it coming, and he wrapped Riku in a suffocating – perfectly tight – hug. 

“What if I had? Would you have killed me?” Naminé asked. Illness and tiredness making her confrontational. Or maybe it was the tension. The longing for Kairi to be there, to complete their triad, to offer her peculiar brand of comfort and optimism. 

“Yes,” Terra answered without missing a beat. Riku wounded around him tighter. 

*

Naoki stared at them without saying a word.  
She was so tired, even more so than Riku felt. So much more he couldn't possibly get his mind around how she managed to be awake or even _alive_.  
She tried to smile at them and her face failed her, her muscles betrayed her weariness, her anger, her pain and fears. 

“I'm glad you're okay,” she said, low and small and almost unreal.  
Riku didn't want to sound cliche or anything, but damn, she was a ghost of herself. 

Naoki had been strong after Aqua's disappearance. She had been a monster of strength, even.  
The pillar every other adult that had been dragged into the Situation of 2006 had relied on.  
But maybe she wasn't strong enough to bear the disappearance of Kairi too.  
Riku wanted to be the one to keep her up, if anything, only to give back some of the support Naoki had given to his father, but he was too broken to help himself.

“Can we spend the night?” he asked the woman, disentangling from Terra's arms only to replace them with Naoki's.  
Her hug was feeble and barely warm, but it was more than he deserved, after letting her now-only daughter go.

“Yes.” Her hands fisted in the back of his coat and she sobbed quietly, but she didn't cry. 

*

Riku accepted the cup Naoki was offering.  
There was not much else he could have done, not when she was looking at him as if a refusal might have been what actually killed her. 

“We should be sleeping,” she murmured in the empty room.  
Naoki's house had never been large, quite the opposite actually, but now it surely felt empty. 

It didn't make any sense.  
They were awake. They were _purposefully_ awake.  
Riku was so tired and every time he closed his eyes he could see Kairi dying, Kairi hurting, Kairi being held inside the Corner House, screaming for help, Kairi inside her own mind begging for someone to save her. Begging for him to save her and he had been too late and she was gone and he couldn't do anything and _he wanted to sleep_ but _she was gone **she was gone**_ **she was gone.**

“We should,” he agreed, sipping from his cup. He couldn't even say if it was decaf or hot chocolate or maybe chamomile?  
Was Naoki a chamomile person?  
He didn't know. He looked inside the cup, the liquid was steaming and sweet and clear. Maybe it was chamomile, after all.  
Theine wasn't good for people that should have been asleep. 

“Do you see her too?” Naoki asked. Or maybe it had been him? He wasn't sure he could recognize what his own voice sounded like, in that moment.  
He stayed silent, in fear of responding to himself and worrying the woman more than necessary, and when she just as quietly nodded, he couldn't tell if she was answering to his question or accepting that he wasn't going to answer hers. 

“I'll find her,” Riku said. He forced himself to make his voice come out as strong as it could. He forced himself to realize he was speaking. It was important. It was the most important thing he had ever done in his life.  
His decaf was cold.  
Or–  
No, no it was chamomile. He had already established–  
Had he?  
_Hadn't_ he? 

“What is this?” he asked Naoki, looking at her.  
She was asleep.  
Her cup was empty, on the coffee table, and she was curled up on the couch. Sleeping like it was nothing and Riku wanted to know how much time he had lost. How long it had been since her – his? – first question?  
Shock didn't suit him. 

“You should come to bed,” Terra whispered to him.  
He hadn't seen his brother come into the living room but Terra was there and he was real and he wasn't going away, not again, never again. 

Riku would keep him. He had decided he would keep him forever. He didn't care what Naminé thought. What his father thought. What the townspeople thought. He was going to keep Terra close and he wasn't going to give him up ever again. “Riku,” his brother called him, and he was closer now, he was so very close and Riku raised a shaky hand to touch his cheek. The bones were hard and for a moment he could have broken them all. He could have. He didn't. “You should come to bed and sleep a little,” his brother murmured, gripping his wrist tight but not painfully.  
Riku sighed and he cried and laughed. All together maybe, or maybe one at a time in a longer span of time that he hadn't realized had passed. 

But when he noticed himself again, Terra was still kneeling in front of him, still caressing the inside of his wrist.

He couldn't breathe properly.  
Now, for the sake of not being excessively cliche, Riku didn't want to have a panic attack.  
_Goddammit_ but he hadn't had a panic attack in over two years. He was cool. His mind was pretty cool. He was better. Not okay. Never okay again, possibly.  
But he was.  
Better. 

Still, he couldn't breathe properly. His lungs, his mouth, his throat, his instincts all were on board to facilitate a correct and normal inhale-exhale routine.  
His mind, though, it wasn't.  
It wasn't a matter of managing it. He did manage it quite perfectly. It was more of a focus thing, he supposed. He was losing snapshots of time and he was losing snapshots of breaths. He was losing a sense of direction.  
“Riku, please,” Terra said, his voice so low, so pained and tired and scared and…  
And were those tears, on his face? Slipping down Riku's fingers? 

“Don't cry,” he said, making a soft fist against his brother's cheek, scraping the skin with his nails. He didn't harm him, though. He would never. Not while shocked, not while calm. “Don't cry, I'm okay,” he said, slipping down the couch he was sitting on and kneeling to the floor, crushing against Terra and hugging him. 

Naoki was nowhere in sight, maybe she had woken up and gone to bed, maybe she had never been there at all.  
It was possible they weren't even in her house. Riku wasn't sure of anything. The last clear thing in his mind was Kairi's empty bedroom and his breathing going shallow and out of rhythm, out of tune.  
Out of control.

“Stay with me now. Don't go again,” Terra pleaded, hugging back tight, no trace of tears in his voice but a whole fucking lot of pained terror. 

“You too. I can't take anyone else leaving me,” Riku told him, or maybe he only thought of telling him. But it was important, just as important as _I'll find her_ , so he repeated, clearer this time “I can't lose anyone else,” and he hoped his brother heard him.


	12. Chapter Eleven

#### 

Chapter Eleven

Naminé was trying not to cry.   
She really was, as she ate her breakfast and drowned the muffled sounds of her sobs in the food. It wasn't the most graceful moment of her life.   
Naoki was caressing her hair without saying a word, and that only worsened the pain in Naminé's chest, bringing no sweet relief with the warmth and simple affection. 

She didn't even remember the last time her own parents had caressed her so tenderly, so lovingly. The only love she knew of was the one Kairi had lavished upon her for years, and that was gone too, had been gone even before Kairi had left. 

“She will forgive you, sweetie,” Naoki murmured, smothering her voice in her cup as she added, “if she's still alive.”   
A chilling breath run through Naminé as she slowly let the words sink in her mind. 

Naoki didn't know about the House. She didn't know anything about the darkest things that went on in Poppytown.   
The only thing she knew was that she had lost two daughters and that she was alone.   
Even so, Naminé couldn't condone her disillusionment. Kairi needed them to believe she was still alive. Kairi needed them to never lose hope.   
Kairi needed them to find her. 

°

There was no actual reason as to why Naminé shouldn't have felt threatened in such a situation.   
Terra was cornering her. He literally had her trapped in a corner of the kitchen and, while he kept a suitable distance from her body, his eyes were killing her slowly, taking her breath away in the worst kind of way. 

“What do you want?” she snapped at the man, because turning aggressive when feeling attacked was a thing she did. A thing that more than not got her in sticky situations such as having to explain various bruises to her parents. Whenever they bothered to notice the way her white skin turned purple and blue and then red and yellow and always a little too taut, a little too tender. 

“I don't care if you have problems with me, Naminé,” Terra started, and Naminé… Well, she didn't know if the viciousness in his voice was something he had picked up in jail or if it was merely protectiveness.   
She already knew were he was going with this, though. She had known since the start, since she had made the mistake of touching Riku in a less than lovingly gentle way. “But don't ever hurt my brother.” 

“You have no room to talk,” she hissed and it was unclear in her mind and heart if she believed that the man in front of her had actually hurt their families or not, but she was going to go down the easier road here, and if that made her feel dirty, well, that was just par for the course. Just something she had to deal with in her own free time. Which was currently nonexistent as she was constantly worrying herself sick about Kairi. Had been for years. 

“I loved them. They were my best friends,” Terra said, and the pain in his voice wasn't fake, couldn't be fake. That kind of soul-deep despair wasn't something a person could make up.   
Naminé realized this.   
She also realized that his love being honest didn't mean he was innocent. “This is not relevant, anyway. You go on believing what makes it easier for you, I don't care. What I care about is Riku and if you hurt him anymore than you are already doing, I will personally see to rectify that.” 

“Are you seriously threatening me? Isn't that too much of a cliche?” 

“Yes I am and no it's not. I don't think you realize that Riku is the only person I have left in this world whom I care about.”

“As if it was any different for me,” she whispered. She didn't consciously–   
She didn't _think_ that.   
She was angry at Riku, she could almost bring herself to hate him, really. She didn't care for him and she wanted to have no business with him or his fucked up mind and life any more than she already had. 

_She did not care for him_ nor she wanted to protect him or treasure him as the last thing she held dear in her life who was still alive and present and–  
_She didn't care about Riku_. She hadn't for the last three years and she wouldn't start up again now only because Kairi was nowhere to be found. 

“As long as we're clear,” Terra said, finality dripping from his lips and not an ounce of relaxation, his muscles still tense, his jaw clenched tight and hard and surely painfully. Naminé knew what that was like. Her mouth was always sore, lately, her teeth always digging in each other and in her worries.

°°°

All around was mayhem and Kairi was trying not to notice. Or care about it. Caring about stuff was the bane of her existence. If she only could switch her concerned and meddling soul off she would. Life would then become so much easier, so much smoother. Just Kairi and a whole lot of fucks not given. 

Just her, doing her things, with no stray thoughts going out to the people around her, or even not currently around her. 

“… If you don't want to spill just say so! Stop being so cryptic all the fricking time!” Thirteen was whining, loudly and irritatingly, his hands soaring in the air like majestic birds.   
All in all, Kairi was bored. There was nothing particularly enticing about the Corner House, not when seen from the inside, not when Xion didn't let her out of her sight for more than a second at a time and surely not when her warden – possible acquaintance, maybe friend in another universe – didn't let her do anything. 

After a few days – days? Had it been actual days? Did she still counted the time in days, anyway? – of constant _Sit down, Princess_ and _Go to sleep, Princess_ and _Fucking Hell, don't touch that, Princess, what are you, an idiot!? Do you want to die!?_ and a whole lot of other reprimands, Kairi was feeling like she had reverted back to a child. Maybe even that same six-year-old girl in the old woman's house who was too sad and too angry and too hyper for not being scolded profusely, all the fucking time. 

Kairi was bored but she was also tired as fuck to be told what she had to and what she couldn't do. 

“Stop being childish,” Xion chided, her voice as level as Kairi had ever heard it. It was mind-boggling how the girl could be so fucking levelheaded and mad at the same time. “I have nothing more to say, I'm not being cryptic. The Princess will save us.” 

“You said the same of me,” Sunshine mumbled.   
Kairi could see him being the hero, actually. Far more clearly than she could see herself being one.   
Sunshine was slim but he had muscles, and his eyes burned like fire whenever he fought and he had a big-ass scythe.   
That was so cool, Kairi could barely restrain herself from drooling all over his weapon of choice.   
In the real world, no one had such cool things. In the real world there were guns strapped to cops' sides and assault rifles in action movies and shitty imitations of medieval blades who didn't even cut through butter most of the times. 

“You were pure when you entered, and then you were not anymore. The Princess in not going to be tainted,” Xion said, clicking her tongue on the roof of her mouth, or maybe her teeth, and it echoed in the hallway. Kairi, sitting on the other end, uncaring about but eavesdropping in on the conversation-fight going on, could easily hear every single breath the three let out. 

She wondered how many other people there were in the House. And where they were at, for that matter.   
Was this place they were in Xion's territory? Was that the reason why only the four of them frequented it? 

“You said the same of me about that too.”

“No. I said you were bright and warm, never that you were untouchable. If you hadn't gotten yourself killed, than mayb–” 

“What the fuck?” Kairi let slip from her lips. She had wanted to keep out of the fight-conversation or conversation-fight, or whatever it was that was going on, but that last statement deserved some kind of reaction. A reaction that wasn't a barely concealed flinch from Thirteen.   
Because, really, what the fuck? “Can you rewind on that a moment and fucking explain?” 

“Hey Princess, I thought you had fallen asleep!” Sunshine said, smiling towards her and waving a silly greeting that Kairi kinda wanted to smile at. He was a dork. He was cute. And he was dead, apparently?  
Like, _what?_   
_**What!?**_  
“So, yeah, no big deal I died. Roro brought me back though.”

“What?” Kairi asked. She wasn't sure she could make a different sound come from her throat. Only– _What?_  
Because that wasn't okay and it wasn't normal and Sunshine had died? But he was still alive? 

She was okay with wrapping her mind around shining spheres of stabby magic, it was weird but it was amenable somehow? Or maybe she had been groomed to believe that, what with all the movies she had seen in which magic was nothing out of the ordinary, not to speak of the endless books she had read which focused on such a subject. 

But necromancy? That was a thing that never worked. And when it _did_ , it never worked well.   
If Thirteen had really brought him back from Death – the fucking capital D Death – Sunshine had no right and no place to look all normal and nice and un-zombie-like. 

“It's nothing weird, really,” Sunshine said, but he was wrong. That was weird alright. “He just saved my life. He would have done it the regular way but it was just a little bit too late for me, so he had to take out the big boy spells.”

“And–” Kairi started, but then her tongue curled and she found her self spitting out a barking, “What.” She didn't even bother with making it a question, but she did tilt her head to the side in a gesture that she hoped they would read as bewilderment and confusion. 

“Okay, so this is definitely strange for someone not used to how the House works but we can bring someone back to life, under certain circumstances,” Thirteen said to her, shrugging at her glare. 

“Circumstances like not giving a damn about your other relatives,” Xion added and, yeah, Kairi could put it together on her own, she had enough information about how the House worked to get the implicit – not really implicit – meaning.   
To save Sunshine's life, Thirteen had deliberately and willingly, consciously robbed some other living relative of his of their life. 

It didn't sound morally twisted in the least. Not even guilt-worthy. It was completely okay.   
Except it wasn't.

And Kairi though…   
She was a bright young lady, she had been told so so many times, it was becoming somewhat of an inside joke with herself.   
She was a bright young woman, and she knew how to jump to conclusions like no one else ever. She was an Olympic gold in jumping to conclusions. 

Thirteen and Sunshine were twins.   
She knew a little, pretty someone who had had a couple of twins. 

Sunshine had died, Thirteen had sacrificed some poor, unsuspecting fucker to bring him back to life. 

Ventus was in a coma. 

_Ventus was in a fucking coma._

“Sora,” she murmured, staring at the two boys and wondering how blind she must have been not to see it before. 

They had Naminé's blue eyes. Ventus' blue eyes. 

Silken hair and soft features, not so tall as much as imposing. “And Roxas,” she laughed at herself, at how stupid and useless she had been for not recognizing the truth.   
It was under her nose. Right there, in front of her, in plain fucking sight. 

Ventus was never waking up again, was he?

°*°

Riku woke up at sunset.   
He had no need whatsoever for the light of day, he craved the dimness of the late afternoon, the darkness of the deepest night. 

He craved a less fucking dramatic brain, sometimes.   
What an asshole, to sprout poetry in his mind as soon as he woke up, when somewhere his best friend's corpse was probably rotting away. 

Okay, no. He needed to stay positive. Kairi was alive, Kairi was a real bitch for going away and he was pissed at her so, so much, so fucking much, he was going to punch her in the face.   
He was going to smother her in the tightest hug ever. 

But he did need the darkness of the deepest night, even if – were his mind a little less muddled by the last remnants of sleep – he would have not referred to it as such.   
Not out loud, at the very least. 

It was at night that Kairi disappeared in the Corner House, and it would be at night that he found his way in. 

It was a matter of pride, these days. He would want in in the fucking place even if he wasn't one-hundred percent sure that Kairi was there.   
The Corner House had hunted him for too long.

*

There was nothing, _nothing_ , **nothing.**  
There was the harsh light from the sun and there was a soft ticking of clocks and in his head there was nothing.

There was something more. There had to be.

“Still confused?”   
Riku yelped and fell off the bed, crumbling on the ground, his head pounding and throbbing in pain. “Shit, are you okay!?” Naminé was kneeling in front of him a second later, her small hands helping him up, patting the bump on his scalp. “God, you need to snap the fuck out of it, Riku. You're scaring us,” she murmured, her fingers slipping around his crown to caress his forehead, his temples, the bridge of his nose.   
“Tell me what's wrong. I can't fix you if I don't know,” she said, pressing her lips to his hair.  
She smelled of snow and grief, she looked it, too, and she felt so cold, always so cold.   
She was the opposite of Kairi. 

Colorful Kairi, scented of flowers and tropical fruits, skin too dark to stem from Poppytown, hair red like the poppies out in the fields.   
Soft, and warm, and chubby and full of smiles.   
Kairi was the opposite of Naminé. 

Kairi wasn't there. 

The longing hurt like nothing had ever hurt Riku, and he knew he was about to do something really fucking stupid. It was what he always did when things hurt too much.

*

It was simple.   
Get out, get in, find her. 

Time wasn't of essence. Silence wasn't of essence. Solitude was. 

He didn't want to go alone. 

“He stopped talking,” Naminé was telling Naoki.   
Amazing mother, Naoki. She would have adopted the entire world if it only let her.   
She had took him in her arms the day Terra had been shipped off to jail, she had embraced him when he told her – her and no one else – that the words the town whispered behind his back hurt enough to make him cry.   
She had been there when his own mother left. 

Naoki would always be there, as long as Riku let her. 

“It was a long time coming,” Terra commented, but only so low that Riku could hear him, not the women. They didn't need that kind of depressive thoughts, really. 

“I do talk,” Riku informed him, but his voice was scratchy and roughened by disuse.   
How long had it been since he had awoken? How long since his last meal, until his next?   
How long since he had gone and taken his brother back?

“It will be okay. He only has to find her,” Naoki said.   
The true meaning behind her words was not lost on anyone in the room. 

He would find her and snap out of it, or he would find her corpse and hit rock bottom.   
It was only up from there, or so people were prone to say. 

“Riku,” his brother called him, and he noticed a hot hand on his shoulder. Terra was taller than he was; the difference had noticeably shrunk down during their time spent apart, but it was still there. Riku could still pretend Terra was the gentle brother who used to protect him from silly school bullies and what not. 

Terra used to take him and Sora to that ice cream parlor that used to be in the middle of the town.   
The shop had closed five years prior, maybe more, and Riku couldn't have told what was the replacement. If there was one at all. 

“Riku, please,” Terra murmured, gripping both his forearms, face so close that Riku could see the fear swimming in his eyes. “Don't go again.”

“You already asked me this,” Riku said, trying to recall the exact moment he had heard the words coming from his brother's lips, trying to put that moment in a neat little box, part of a much larger timetable he needed to build in his head. “You did, right?”

“Yes. Last night.”

“No. Not only…” Riku mumbled something, something that was not words, not sentences, not anything. He mumbled pointless sounds, hoping that would keep him hanging on reality for a little bit longer. “Terra,” he called, and forced his eyes to see, to focus on his brother. He gripped his arms in turn, and then his hands. “Keep me here,” he whispered, he begged, he prayed. 

He needed to be centered and focused and _here_. 

“Yes,” Terra told him, and held his hands tight. Really, really tight. It was grounding. It was good. It was what he needed.

It was final. 

*

It was even simpler.   
Get in. 

He stepped inside. 

“It's colder,” Naminé complained.   
Riku couldn't say what she compared the temperature to. It was cold, yes, it was definitely not colder than the air blowing outside. 

“Sharing time,” Terra announced, and it was so weird, glimpsing a hint of that playfulness that had characterized him when he was younger and happy and fruitfully in love. “The House has tricks up its sleeve. And it has a lot of sleeves. Don't let it frighten you.” 

“I have to let it frighten me. Fear is what keeps us alive,” Naminé argued with him, tying up her hair with a white, elastic wristband. 

“She held the art show in here,” Riku said, mostly to himself. His mind was trying to work out a kink or two. Things that didn't add up nicely and evenly. “She knew she would see something,” he rationalized. 

Kairi didn't like the Corner House. Kairi was very much inclined to doing stupid shit for no reason whatsoever. Kairi was likely already obsessed with this place the day she had brought him here.   
Kairi was following a plan of her own.

“What?” Naminé asked him, shivering even in her multilayered outfit.   
Riku admired her ability to wear wool against her bare skin, really. He also admired the effortless way in which she moved despite being dolled up in a thousand shirts ad sweaters and at least two coats. 

“Do you want my jacket?” he offered, shrugging his jacket off even before she nodded. He was overheating, after being exposed to the rigid temperature outside. He draped the jacket on Naminé's shoulders, buttoning it up with swift movements, all the while trying to think if Kairi was on a schedule here, or if she was just moving around like a headless chicken, trying to make the most of her obsession while it lasted. 

“What about the art show?” she asked again, staring straight into his eyes. 

“She held it in here.”

“You've come in here often?” Terra inquired, stepping at his back, so close Riku could feel the heat radiating off of him. 

“No. A few times, that's all. Mostly with Kairi,” Riku reassured him. “She held the art show in here. She wanted to come here. With me.”

“Where is this going, Riku?” Naminé asked, tilting her head, mouth a fine line on her pale face. 

Riku didn't know what the answer was.


	13. Chapter Twelve

#### 

Chapter Twelve

“The Prophet wants to see her,” Sora said. 

Kairi sat down and observed.   
She rationalized. 

“ _What do **you** think?_ ” her therapist would often ask, and so Kairi asked herself too. Rationalizing was good, sometimes. Not everything had to be led by her shallow impulse control or her just as shallow heart and emotions. She could be a logical person too. She could _rationalize_.

“The Prophet speaks to you?” Thirteen – no, _Roxas_ – asked. Kairi had no idea what they were talking about. She couldn't focus on their voices. She had a line of thoughts to follow, here, and it was pretty fucking important. 

So, Xion. Xion was some sort of weird manifestation of her subconscious, right? She had had this thought before, more than once. Xion was born in the House and she was absolutely mental and she was always pissed off for no reason and she had a deep affection for flower pots. Somewhere in Kairi's past there had to have been some fucking flower pot reference or something on that line. 

The House was real, though. Damn, the Corner House was the realest thing in her life. She had been surrounded by its iconography and whatnot her entire life. _Riku_ agreed that the Corner House was real and creepy as fuck.   
Hell, even Naminé agreed, and it was hard to get Naminé to agree on anything ever. 

“The Prophet can fuck himself for all I care,” Xion spat out.  
Yeah, always pissed off. What kind of life had Kairi's subconscious created for the physical manifestation of itself and what kind of twisted fucking additional mental problem this meant for Kairi? 

This was prime masturbatory material for her therapist, no doubt. She would make sure to relate to him every discovery about herself and her psyche upon her return to the real world. 

Because the House, the Corner House she was currently living and breathing and seeing and experiencing, it was not the real world.   
This was a fucking scam of her brain, and it was so obvious, when she had grown up versions of Sora and Roxas in front of her. 

She wondered when Aqua would make her appearance, if ever, because she was the only one not yet accounted for. 

And after her sister finally arrived, Riku and Terra and Naminé could come too and it would be a fucking party, all in her mind, and everyone – the real ones – would be pretty uncomfortable at seeing her talking to no one and Kairi would finally be happy. 

Fuck her life. 

°*°

There had been no shadows in the Hummen County Jail.

***

_Sent 04/15/16_  
_I'm sorry. I love you._

_luv u 2 <3 _

That had been the ending of the last petty fight she had had with Kairi.   
It had lasted an entire week. Seven days of torture, of pure agony. 

Naminé couldn't even remember what they had been fighting about, but she would never forget how painful it was to not being able to casually talk to Kairi, to hug her, pet her hair, kiss her mouth until she finally shut up, her mumbling against her lips, rambling about something or other that someone in her class had done. 

Naminé hadn't spoken to Kairi for months.   
Even before she got lost, it had been weeks of non-communication.   
Complete silence on all fronts. 

It was the gooey filling of nightmares, and she knew she deserved it.   
She deserved it all. 

Apologies and stilted confessions would not save her, this time, they would not give her Kairi back. 

She had managed to push away the last person who loved her in the entire world. 

Terra had said the House had tricks up its sleeves. Naminé wondered if said tricks involved red hair just in the corner of her eye, turning down an opposite hallway, entering a room that wasn't there. 

°°°

“Princess,” Xion called her, forcibly making her snap out of his thoughts.   
Kairi sighed and looked up at the girl. She seemed more and more familiar every day Kairi spent with her, and it was worrisome to an extent.   
She didn't want anything in the Corner House becoming familiar. 

She didn't want to get attached to figments of her own sick mind. 

“Yes?”

“The Prophet wants to speak to you,” Xion said, her expression telling Kairi how much the girl loathed the idea. 

“So I've heard,” she muttered. They had discussed the Prophet for hours, without once inviting her in the conversation despite the fact that it was almost entirely her business. “Who's that?”

“He is an asshole. Mostly,” the girl spat out, crossing her lean arms on her chest. She scoffed hard at the ground. “He is also a good strategist,” she conceded.   
Oh, the effort she had to put in such simple words. Kairi could almost laugh at her. 

“Why does he wants to talk to me?”

“Because he wants freedom. Like everyone else in this hellhole. Why do you think!?” Xion snapped, nearly growling. 

“You're a delight to talk to,” Kairi told her. She had far less qualms about shitting on her own subconscious than another not-quite-human being. And that was such a good thing, too, because she had wanted to be a bitch to Xion since day one. The girl was just really apt at pissing her off, for some reasons. 

“Thank you, I know.” Xion dismissed her with a wave of her hand, and Kairi – against all rational thinking she had been doing lately – waited for pain to come with the gesture. The pain, obviously, didn't come.

“Well, when am I going to meet him?” 

“Whenever the idiots bring him around. Trust me, Princess, you're not impatient to see him. He's the most pretentious dickhead you'll ever meet.”

“You know him well,” Kairi said, smirking at the girl. There was obviously history, there, history that Kairi wanted to know. She wanted to know who her subconscious despised so much.   
She wouldn't even be able to say who was the most pretentious dickhead she knew _consciously_. 

“Of course I do. He's my brother,” Xion hissed, gritting her teeth. 

°*°

Naminé noticed first.   
She had always been the most intuitive, out of them, but Riku wasn't exactly oblivious when she finally stopped in her track and cursed, “This is some cliche bullshit!” 

“Keep going,” Terra said, his voice really low and small. The smallest Riku had heard him. He was stoically looking forward, a hand placed against the wall. He wasn't leading them, Naminé had taken that upon herself as soon as they stepped inside the Corner House, but Riku had the feeling that his brother knew this place much better than they did. 

“We're going in circles!” the girl screamed, her nerves fraying under Riku's eyes, her ever-present composure skimming down to atoms and then expiring. Bye bye rationality, welcome all-consuming rage and frustration. 

And how could he not understand her? The House had been driving him mad for years; ten years he had spent fearing this place, but still he kept his head on his shoulders, because he was not here to be driven up the walls. He was here to find Kairi and he had to be calm. 

“We're not. I told you,” Terra said, not daring to look at them, keeping his eyes fixed in front of him. There was nothing at the end of the hallway. And that was to say, there was nothing but darkness. Naminé had tried illuminating the space with her phone, but to no avail. Where there was darkness, there could not be light.  
The Corner House, after all, wasn't bound to follow the simple rules Riku – and all people, really – had grown up with. “The house will play tricks on you. Don't let it win.”

“This is not a fucking competition!” Naminé screeched, and she was so tired, so weary, and Riku knew how that felt, he would have given her all the reassurances, all the chances to rest she needed, all the solutions to their problems.   
But he was only a boy in the Corner House and he couldn't do anything but try his hardest to help. “We're not trying to win against a damn building!”

“Naminé,” Terra started, giving them the shortest glance. Riku wanted to paint all over his brother's fears, to erase them and mask them and hide them from his own eyes. They hurt. The panic he could see on Terra's face and that he could hear in his eyes were the worst kind of torture. “Keep your sanity close. You can lose anything but you can't lose your mind.”

“I'm not the one losing my mind.”

*°*

The Prophet had Xion's blue eyes and soft mouth and pale skin.   
Their likeliness started and ended there. 

“Your name,” he asked of Kairi. It sounded terribly like an order.   
She decided to reserve her judgment, but the first impression he made was terrible. 

Kairi wasn't much one for first impressions, though. Riku had shoved her to the ground the first time they met. Because he was an asshole kid. They had both cried, that day. 

“Princess. For now,” Xion answered in her stead, placing her small body in between Kairi and her own brother. 

Weird, how her conscience had a brother. Was it perhaps the mangled memory of someone Kairi had spent her first four years next to? Was the Prophet her mind's projection of a boy she didn't actually remember and that she had left the day she had been adopted? 

Her parents wouldn't have torn her from a blood brother, would have they?

“This is not your time to speak,” the Prophet said, cool as ice, grating as jagged metal.   
Yeah, bad first impression. The worst. 

Xion was not the kindest of people, but she had never harmed Kairi and was actually somewhat a friendly figure in her eyes.   
Kairi hated people who mistreated her friends. 

“But since you insist on having my attention, I have a message to relay to you.”

“From?”

“Skullbearer.” Xion shuddered and her face settled on bitterness and anger and her hands sparkled with magic.   
The Prophet, who probably had chosen his name for more reasons than just the sheer corny badassery of it, clicked his tongue and made a shadowy book appear in his hands. “Don't test my patience, little sister.”

“Mother is not her given name, we can still use it,” Xion spat out. 

On either side of Kairi, Sunshine and Thirteen were silent.   
Sora and Roxas.   
Naminé's twins.   
They were quiet and their expressions dark, and they were not going to defend Xion any time soon. 

Kairi straightened her back and decided to be the one to do it.   
They better call her Knight, from then on, because she was about to swoop in and save Xion from her own dipshit brother as if it were the end of the world and Xion was the last damsel in distress that still needed to be saved and her own personal, appointed Knights were terribly late to the party. 

Kairi would not be late to the party. She was the party. 

“Mother is what she had been called for years, it might as well be engraved in her blood and bones. I will refer to her as Skullbearer and so will you, little sister, unless you want her to die as father has.”

“It was not my fault!” Xion screamed, and the Prophet only looked on in her despair, untouched. He turned to look at Kairi, his beautiful eyes – well, the only one visible from under his dramatic hair – bore a hole in her soul. 

“Choose a name. Now,” he ordered her.  
Kairi took a step forward. Let this dipshit know she was not intimidated by his terrifying fashion choices and his theatrical hairstyle. She was toe to toe with Xion now, and she could see the teardrops glistening in the girl's eyes. Her heart constricted and she couldn't breath properly. A second later, everything was normal again. 

“Knight. Call me the fucking Knight,” she spat out. The least her useless mental ramblings could do was give her something she could actually use, once in a while. 

“Very well, Knight. You're the one who will bring everyone out of the house. _So it is written, so it is done_ ,” he said, and it was a prophecy. It was an oath, and Kairi could not break said oath because it was the magical kind. He opened up his shadowy book and blew a whisper on a page. Kairi couldn't see what was written on it, if anything, but she could have sworn on her own head that he was putting the magic down, making it real, making it stronger. “Little sister, you will be the Sorceress now. Don't disappoint us. This is Skullbearer's message for you.”

“She wants me to be a Player!? I'm the hostess! I've always been the hostess of this fucking court, she can't take that from me.”

“You will be the Sorceress,” the Prophet repeated, even more frigid. Kairi stepped to the side, her hand finding Xion's upper arm, squeezing gently. Xion was bones and skin and not much else, but she was warm and fiery and full of passion and magic and violence. “So Skullbearer wants, and so it will be. You will not be a player, you will follow the Knight and _you. Will. Be. Helpful._ ”

“Father didn't die because of me,” Xion said again, and Kairi's heart broke in two, than in three pieces as the first tear dripped from the girl's eyes. And then in a million of thousands pieces as a sob escaped Xion's tightly pressed lips. “I would have been helpful,” she lamented, and Kairi wondered how old she had been when her father died. “He let himself go, Ienzo. My hands are free of his blood.”

“Don't speak my name, Sorceress.”

“Don't put his death on me, brother,” she rebuked, the sparks surrounding her hands dimming to nothingness. She crossed her arms, “I will be helpful,” she said, somehow reticent and complying at the same time. 

°

“Family is hard,” Sunshine whined, laid out on the floor like it was the most comfortable of mattresses.   
Kairi could hear his voice, his lamenting everything from the Prophet to the weather, but her attention was mostly focused on Xion. 

The girl had taken Thirteen to the side as soon as her brother had left, and they had yet to regroup with her and Sunshine.   
_Sora_. 

Kairi had liked Sora, when they were children, for that little time they had spent together. She wondered what would have happened, had he not left for the Corner House.   
Would they have been best friends? Datemates, maybe?   
Would he and Roxas have been included in their trio of renegades? 

“I wouldn't know. My sister left when I was little,” she told him, stealing his spot on the ground a little, just a corner of it, to let the heat of his body seep into her thighs. 

“I had a sister too, before coming here with Roro,” Sunshine said, and Kairi wanted to tell him that she knew, she wanted to ask him if he remembered said sister's name, if he was okay with sacrificing her life to heal his and Roxas' wounds.

If he remembered Ventus and if he wanted to know what had happened to his older brother. 

“But that's entirely too much information, gosh, what is wrong with me? Seeing the Prof gives me the weirdest needs for over-sharing.” He let out an embarrassed little chuckle and Kairi didn't feel endeared to him as she had the first days in the Corner House. 

He was actively stealing her girlfriend's – former girlfriend, actually, but at the same time not really – life. He was putting Naminé in danger every time he got hurt, every time he let Thirteen get hurt. “He has this spell going, you know?” Sora continued, ignoring the tension in her body, maybe, or deeming it completely unimportant. “It _encourages_ honesty. The Prof is all about honesty and reality, yeah? Like, he needs the things he says to work, so he forces them to be real no matter what. You gotta admit that's pretty cool.”

“And what's your power?” Kairi asked him, maybe too forcefully, maybe her voice was too much of a growl, too much of a hiss for him to ignore it, but the only sign he gave her was a curious glance and a small smirk. 

“My primary is Heart Manipulation,” Sora said. Kairi, obviously, didn't get why he sounded so proud of himself, but she didn't even bothered to ask. It was probably something extremely terrifying and she was already terrified enough. “Then I got weapons and armor conjuration. That's pretty cool now because I have my beautiful scythe and the players have started to call me Grim Reaper, which, you know, it's really _cool_.” Kairi huffed at him but she didn't comment on any of it. 

It _was_ cool, after all. And the scythe was a mighty fine looking weapon, all cradled in thorns and flowers made of colorful diamonds, so thinly cut to feel soft under her hands.  
“And I guess I can turn into shadows, from time to time, when the situation is dire. Xion's words, not mine. That's more of a side effect to my death than anything else, though. Useful, when it does happen; unreliable for the most part.”

“And Thirteen?” She patted herself on the back for not slipping on Roxas' true name. It would do no good to any of them if she were to reveal she knew about them.   
That she knew _them_. As they were supposed to be. 

“Roro's got the standard Light-Dark dichotomy, again, Xion's words. He is super powerful in both, mind. He is the best healer after Xi, and a Depleter so, you know…” But Kairi didn't know. 

He might as well have been speaking a different language, for as much as she knew.

She leveled Sora with a glare that ordered him to explain better, and he laughed at her. “Okay, sorry. I guess I spent too much time in here. A Depleter is a dark class. They consume other people's powers and can use them for a little while. It's very useful in battle, and Roro is a strong Depleter, not the casual kind. He can drain you and leave you empty forever. I've seen it happen and it's terrifying.”

“You talking about me?” Thirteen – Roxas, sweet, shy Roxas who never wanted to play in the park with them because he was afraid of Riku and his assholish ways – asked, a blond eyebrow raised. 

“Just 'bout how badass you are, bro. Nothing bad, I swear,” Sora told him, leaning up on his elbows and tilting his head to point at the spot next to him. Roxas sat down, running a hand through his messy hair.

“How's Xion?” Kairi asked him, searching and not spotting the girl anywhere. 

“She needs some alone time now. This is a very big mess. Very fucking big.”

°

“Roro!” Sora half-yelled.   
Kairi jumped up in her cot, breath thin and quick. 

She had been dreaming of Naminé bleeding out, Naminé sharing Ventus' room, Naminé never waking up again. 

She had been dreaming of her girlfriend for days, since Xion had told her what happened to Players' relatives when they were healed with magic.

Next to her, sharing her room for the time being, since Xion needed her space, still, was Roxas, sitting in the same position as her, hair even more spiky and unruly than usual, breaths just as slim and difficult. 

“What happened?” he asked of his brother, voice loud enough to be heard through the closed door. “Are you hurt?”  
Kairi hoped he wasn't, because Ventus didn't have any more life to give them and Naminé was too important for them to kill her. 

She would have sooner killed them herself than let them hurt her girlfriend, no matter how friendly they were, how nice it was to talk to them, or how much they were trying to help her in this absurd delusion of hers. 

Maybe she should have taken her pills, after all. 

“Come here, now!” Came Sora's voice, and Roxas scrambled to his feet, tangling his legs in his duvet and falling face first in the ground.   
His nose was bleeding but that wasn't, apparently, enough to stop him from running to his brother's side. 

A dog, Kairi thought, not even bothering to squish down the contempt and the disgust she felt, momentarily, for them both. 

“Is that–” Kairi could hear, and then mumbled words she didn't understand. 

“Adelphos! Brother!” Sora yelled out, louder than ever, and Kairi got scared of the volume even if she knew they were talking, that they were there, that she was not alone. 

And then, right after her heart had gone back to beating at a somewhat normal pace, she heard Riku's voice echoing through the walls,“Who the fuck are you?”


	14. Chapter Thirteen

#### 

Chapter Thirteen

Kairi had called herself Knight.   
She was going to do her job. 

°*°

Riku felt himself fall to the floor as two figures crashed into him like tidal waves the size of a midget. 

“Adelphos!” the tanner of the two screeched, spinning them around in midair so it was his back to collide with the ground and not Riku's. “It's been so long,” he whined, pulling a strand of Riku's hair in what was supposed to be a playful tug, maybe?   
He wasn't sure. “You promised you would take only a moment!”

“I literally don't know who you are,” Riku told him, but the boy merely smiled at him, showing all his white teeth.   
The other one, the one with blond hair and pale skin – who kinda reminded Riku of Ventus, actually, and of Naminé – seemed content in staying quietly sprawled on top of Riku's back. He felt like a sandwich. 

“I'm Sunshine! And he's Thirteen. And you're Adelphos.”

“No. I'm–”

“Shush,” Sunshine – really? Riku was supposed to believe that someone had called their child Sunshine? – put both his hands on his mouth and shook his head no. “Don't say your true name, brother. Have you really forgotten how the House works? It has not been that long.”

“Why Adelphos?” Naminé asked. For the moment, Riku could see that she was stalling. She was not thinking about any possible implication. She was thinking about nothing that wasn't the situation at hand.   
He hoped Terra was doing the same, for his safety. 

“Well, Xion chose it, really. She's the smart one,” Thirteen – Riku wouldn't even comment on the silliness of it – said, snuggling closer to him, as if that was possible in the first place, and he buried his nose in Riku's neck. He could feel the boy's warm breath colliding with his skin and shivers were running all through him. 

He was starting to get claustrophobic. 

“But what does it mean?” Naminé asked again, more pissed now.

“It means brother. It's ancient Greek,” Terra told her, moving closer. Riku could see the incinerating glare he threw at Thirteen and Sunshine both, and, eventually, he found himself free of them and on his feet. He was grateful. So fucking grateful.   
He cuddled up to his brother's – his real brother – side, letting Terra wrap an arm around his waist, so tight as to hurt just a little bit. 

It was the best kind of hurt, really. The protective kind. The kind he had experienced countless times while he was still under Naminé's scrupulous care. 

“Why would you call me brother? It doesn't make any sense. That's not my name,” Riku said, staring at the boys in front of him. If he had to guess their ages, he would say they were sixteen. Maybe fifteen. 

“We picked it for you, actually,” Thirteen confessed. “It was the only thing you were saying when–”

“Don't,” Terra warned, and Riku snuggled closer, impossibly so, to him. He still didn't want to know what had happened in the Corner House when he had been there as a child. 

“Who are you?” Sunshine asked, his wide grin twisting at the edges, getting sharper. Not scary, per se, not even fake. Just menacing. 

“The Rook,” Terra said without even taking one second to think about it. Without wavering. 

Had he been in the Corner House long? Did he know this place?   
How had he managed to get out if he had been in here?

How had _Riku_? He had been a baby, then. A stupid child. How did he get to save himself when Aqua – an eighteen-year-old, super resourceful woman – couldn't? 

“I killed a Rook, once,” Sunshine said. Riku knew his expression was hard and disbelieving and turning threatening. He took a step forward, ignoring Terra's outstretched arm, pushing down on it to pass. He stopped only when he was standing right in front of the boy.

He was not intimidated. 

Sunshine was a good deal shorter than him. Riku ignored the lean muscles he could see under the tan skin, the boy's arms naked.

“Don't threaten my brother,” he whispered, just low enough to not let Terra or Naminé hear him.   
He was no master of whispering, nor of rough love, but he was the most protective out of them. Had always been.

“Why, I wasn't,” Sunshine said, trying to blind him with a two-thousand watts smile, his head cocked to the side and up to stare at Riku with his weird eyes. “All I'm saying is, maybe buff-guy there would like to change his name in something with a little less baggage, you know? It was friendly advice.”

“Sun,” the other guy, Thirteen, whispered in warning. His head was turned to the direction they had come from.   
Riku looked too, just as Sunshine did, and his breath hitched and choked him.

_Kairi_. His mind screamed.   
She was right there.   
Beautiful as always. Radiant, almost, even if she was tired-looking and dressed in pajama pants and a tank top, her bra straps abandoned down her arms, an electric pink that offset her dark skin and her perfect eyes, shining even in the colorless light of the House.

**Kairi. Kairi,** _**Kairi, KairiKairiKairiKairiKairiKairiKairi.**_

Kairi.

She was there.   
Running to him. She was staring and her irises were indigo flames.   
She was there and she stepped in between Riku and Sunshine, giving him her back.

Riku lifted a trembling hand to touch the scapula showing from her low cut shirt.

“No,” she snapped at him, turning her head like the crack of a whip, her hair slashing around her face. “You're not real. I don't want to talk to you.”

“I–” Riku started. He wanted to say her name. He wanted to say her name so bad it hurt. But he couldn't. 

*°*

She looked so much like Aqua had at her age.   
Her hair were not cropped short to her head, and they were not a soft hue of blue, no.   
Her eyes were not the purest polls of water shining under the morning sun.   
Her skin was not as pale as marble, and just as taut. 

Kairi was soft where Aqua had been coiled muscles. She was feminine in a way that Aqua had refused for the longest time.   
She was velvet and curves and reckless emotion. 

Aqua had been the opposite. 

But Kairi still looked so much like her.   
Terra clutched his chest and kept his cries inside his mouth. The bitter taste sadly familiar, almost comforting, after ten years.   
He missed Aqua like he had missed freedom.   
He missed Aqua like water and air and sunlight and gravity. Aqua was his everything. And she was gone. 

***

She couldn't believe it.  
She didn't.

Riku was talking to the twins. He was seeing them.   
They were all a by-product of Kairi's mind. They were not real. They were just as unreal as the House – the side she was seeing of it – was. Just as unreal as Xion, her own subconscious made real in a girl's malnourished body. 

That could only mean that Riku – and his brother and Naminé – were unreal too.   
Images her mind was conjuring up for her, maybe to make her feel better, maybe as punishment. 

Kairi, after all, loathed herself with a passion that humans rarely came to know in their lifetimes.   
They were there, just as the texts Riku sent her said they would be.

And that…  
That meant the texts were false too. Everything she had relied on was false. Her friends were not looking for her. They were not coming in the Corner House. 

Bittersweet was not something Kairi needed a better knowledge of, and still it filled her heart. 

_Bittersweet_ , the realization that Riku and Naminé – and yes, even Terra, because she still cared for him too, despite everything – were safe. 

_Bittersweet_ , they weren't going mad with loneliness. They weren't destroying themselves to go after Kairi.

_Bittersweet_ , to know they didn't care for her as much as she cared for them.  
  
Were they even alive? Did they kill themselves the moment they found out she was gone?

Kairi stepped forward. And then she was running. 

Illusions and everything they were, they were still better than nothing. 

°*°

Naminé woke up.  
It was a slow process. 

Step one, she saw the House all around her.   
Sepia tones. Shadows in every corner.   
Whispers of creatures she didn't want to come to know. 

She had known the House for a while. That sort of acquaintance one would much rather ignore for the rest of their life.   
She too did want to ignore the House.   
But she couldn't. 

Step two to her waking up was the umpteenth flash of red.   
She saw it in her direct line of sight, this time, and it was attached to a very familiar face. A very familiar head. And said head came with a body attached. A body Naminé knew by heart, by hand, by mouth and by her own body too. 

Of Kairi, she loved every inch.   
She loved the freckles spotting her dark skin. She loved the perfect softness of her epidermis. The absence of flaws. 

Of Kairi she loved the limpid voice, like dew on crystals. Like freshly mowed grass after a rainstorm. 

She loved her hair, long and straight and red like caked blood.

Naminé loved Kairi's indigo eyes. The ignored hue of the rainbow. The color of magic and passion and love. For her. Because Kairi was all these things and so many more. She was her best friend. Her girlfriend. The love of her life. 

Three, Naminé breathed freely for the first time in a very long time.   
So easy. It was so easy. Open her lips, inhale. Her chest expanded and she pushed the air out. Carbon dioxide where once there was oxygen. 

And back to Kairi.   
She had new eyes to look at her with. 

Kairi was power, running towards them.   
Towards Riku, actually, because even if Naminé had been her girlfriend, to Riku was reserved a special place in Kairi's heart. And this she loved too, about the girl. 

Kairi was fierce as a fire. She protected what was hers. She was also a possessive creature. A dragon who collected humans and made them hers and then protected them and helped them and made them the happiest she could. 

Sometimes, Kairi also cared about herself.   
Naminé loved her more when she did. 

Four, After the breathing, it came the elation.   
No.   
There were too many feelings she was feeling. Too many emotions and thoughts and things.   
So many. 

First, all the love. Where was she supposed to put all this love that was tearing her apart? She had to push it to the side; she had to think rationally. There was already Riku having an emotional breakdown for all the love that was being felt.   
Naminé was being rational. 

First was too much love. She pushed it to the side. She choked it and killed it. But only momentarily.   
Second, the relief. So strong as to knock her on her knees. But Naminé was strong and she kept her ground. She would always be the one still standing, even when going against her heart and mind. She would not be beaten by stupid chemical reactions, really.   
There was Riku for that. And sometimes Kairi. 

Naminé loved Kairi all the time.   
She loved her more when she let her emotions bloom and spill.   
Kairi's passion was a beautiful tragedy to witness. 

Third, some kind of all-encompassing wrath.   
Naminé didn't have the time neither to understand it, nor to subdue it.  
There it went, to the side. In the corner of her mind for things she didn't or couldn't deal with. 

In that corner was the hurt on Riku's face when she had told him she believed Terra to be guilty, years and years prior.   
There was also the pain and rage in Kairi's voice when she told her it was over. 

Fourth it came the elation.   
Kairi was there. 

And fifth, pain. Searing and cold and burning.   
Naminé was dying. 

Five, after the emotions came the movement.   
And sooner, rather than later, Naminé's arms were wrapping around Riku and Kairi and she was crying.   
Riku was crying.   
Even Kairi was crying. 

“You're not real,” the girl told them, wailing like a hurt dog, like fear and pain and anguish were tearing at her skin with blunt teeth and a sharp hunger. 

°°°

The Mansion was talking to her.   
The Mansion always spoke to her in soft, parental whispers.   
Xion felt safe in these walls, walking these floors. She felt loved. 

Echoes of dead voices came to her ears.   
She was no Sorceress. 

She was the Hostess. She had accepted her role a long time prior.   
Her mother – _Skullbearer_ , the House said, the voices cried, dead by her unwavering hand, by her cold eyes – had no right to strip her of the name she had made for herself. 

Her mother – _Skuld_ , a voice called her, called for her, sad and anguished and longing, a voice Xion knew like the back of her hands, like her own reflection – had no right to place a new name, a new goal, on her shoulders. 

And maybe Xion had to atone. For being a lousy child, for being less than Ienzo – the Prophet, the man whose words were truth impatient to become reality – for helping in her father's demise. Maybe she had to atone and apologize and better herself, but she had shaped herself to do that in the shoes of the Hostess.   
Protect the children stepping into the Corner House, protect those too naive and innocent and pure to understand how cruel the world her parents had created could be. 

“Sorceress,” her mother called her, her voice reverberating against every wall, against the ground under Xion's feet. She was no daughter of Skullbearer's.   
She had been the beloved daughter of Skuld – _mother, creator, maker of mistakes, soul_ – and Ephemera – _dead, father, dearest, missed, heart_ – and she was now daughter and caretaker of the House. 

“Mother,” she answered the room.  
Skullbearer was nowhere to be seen, and still Xion saw her through furniture and wallpaper and tiles.  
She saw her long, black hair, her slender eyes, warm and dark and cruel.  
She saw the bones she wore on her armor, like jewels, like memories, like something she should have never, ever touched. 

Skuld – _mother, dear, loving caretaker, thinker_ – had been kind. She had been soft, and a warrior only with words. She had been strong in a loving way. The House had worshiped her. Still worshiped her memory, and Xion did too. 

Skullbearer was something that only born the shape of her mother. There was nothing of Skuld in the white queen that destroyed souls and stole bones. 

“The Prophet has spoken, Sorceress, and you will be helpful.”

“Yes, mother,” Xion said to the flowerpots. Her father had loved the flowers she used to pick for him and her mother.   
His father had taught her how to cater to them, how to keep them alive and happy and verdant. 

There had been a time when being helpful, for Xion, had meant picking flowers and smiling bright, smiling wide, and laughing at her parents' jokes, laughing with her brother. 

There had been a time when, even if constricted in the House, Xion had been happy. Sickly and weak and serene. Coddled, loved, sheltered. 

The House was the only being who still cared for her, now, and Xion was going to care for it in return. 

°~*~°

_Don't stare._   
_Don't._   
_Stare._

“You're staring,” Roro said, teased, touching Sunshine's shoulder with a trembling hand. 

“What do you think of her?” Sunshine asks, taking his brother's hand in his ones to placate the shaking.   
Whenever they touched, the magic remembered darker times and Sunshine burned inside. The shadows consuming his soul begged to arise and he had to shut them up, shut them out, deeper down in his core.  
Pain was something he had started to get used to. 

“The Knight? I like her. You know I like her, already,” Roro said, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head. His eyes were huge.   
He was seeing it too.   
Sunshine didn't have to be in his brother's head to know that he was seeing it too. 

“The unnamed one,” he specified anyway.   
Roro had the ugly tendency to ignore the things he didn't want to think about. He didn't approach life with an adventurous outlook.

“No, Sun,” he spat out, almost sobbing.   
Sunshine smiled at him and he knew it didn't look kind. It was a jagged type of emotion, the one he was feeling, and not for the first time. But for the first time ever he was sure he was right. 

“Yes. She's the one.” 

“She's dead,” Roro whispered. Sunshine chuckled at him.   
No.   
She wasn't dead. She was _allegedly_ dead. Nothing they could prove, not while being stuck in the House. 

“She's right there. You see it too,” he said, gripping his brother's hand tighter, painfully tight. Roro winced and elbowed him in the side. 

“I don't see anything. You're delusional, Sun.”

“Wanna bet?”

“No.”

Sunshine chuckled again, and it was darker, it was shadows and smoke and not his voice. He let the hand go, no reason to poke at the shadows sleeping inside him. No reason to provoke them. They were not in a dire situation here. They were safe and amongst friends. 

“Focus on Adelphos. You've been waiting for him for years,” Roro told him, ordered almost. As if Sunshine would ever follow his orders again. As if he had any right to order him around like a loyal dog pending from his lips, waiting for his every command, begging for them. 

Sunshine had died everyday for a lifetime, and then some, because he had listened to his brother's orders.   
And now someone else he loved was dead, but it wasn't his sister, because she was standing right there, wrapped in Adelphos' and the Knight's arms, sobbing and crying and whispering like a spider, a web-spinner of tales and lies and memories. 

Sunshine could see the magic gleaming under her skin, pumping in her blood, he could use it, too, if he wanted. 

“He has grown up quite nicely,” he commented, leaning to rest his head on his brother's shoulder. Roro's hair tickled his face and he didn't care. 

“He had promised to come back soon,” Roro said, because if there was something he was good at, it was holding a grudge. 

“He's here now.”

“After years. Don't make that face, I had to comfort you for ages because he wouldn't come back.”

“He's here now,” Sunshine repeated, emptying his face of every expression, every emotion. He had longed for Adelphos' return, he couldn't lie about it. Not to Roro, who had been there to listen to his every whine and to dry his every tear.   
But his friend was back. He had not forgotten to come back, even if he had forgotten why he had to.


	15. Chapter Fourteen

#### 

Chapter Fourteen

  
Kairi caught herself staring.   
She couldn't help it. 

Riku's hair were shiny silver in the sepia tones of the Corner House, his eyes a gleaming teal, and he was terribly out of place.   
Then again, no one was _in_ of place, inside the Corner House. It was just not a place for real people. 

But Riku was not a real person, was he?

Kairi just wished her mind would stop putting people next to her. She just wanted to stop imagining her friends for herself, to stop creating nice surroundings in a place that had nothing nice inside.   
She longed to feel the real terror one might have in the Corner House, see its real darkness. 

No Sora and Roxas, no Riku, and definitely no Naminé. 

She didn't want to think about Naminé. 

°

“I left for two minutes.” It's what Xion hissed when she came back.   
Kairi noticed the fraying of her edges like they were her own. Because they were her own.   
What a surprise, that her subconscious appeared so close to breaking, really. No reason at all behind that, if not the fact that Kairi's brain was conjuring up the most terrifying and – at the same time – most reassuring scenario possible in such a situation as the one she had gotten herself into. “Why can't you people function without me around? You're not children anymore.”

“It's Adelphos,” Thirteen said, but Kairi had to growl in her throat at that.   
It was not just _Riku_.  
It was the fact that they were in the Corner House, despite not being really there.  
It was the fact that Naminé looked pale and fragile and sick.   
It was Terra observing everything from a detached angle, standing just a step outside the picture. 

It was that the only missing one was Aqua and Kairi waited for her arrival even if it was impossible. 

Would she even recognize her own sister, after ten years spent apart?

“Good Lord and Lady,” Xion spat out, the strange choice of words not masking the curse in her voice. “How did this even happened? He was not supposed to come back.”

“What?” Sunshine piped up, snapping his head off the wall he was slouching against and staring at Xion with flames burning in his eyes.  
Kairi was preparing herself for another almost-fight. 

“What what? When we marked him it was for a reason, you idiot. He was not supposed to come back.”

“But you said–” Thirteen started, trailing off when Xion lifted a hand.   
Because, of course, Kairi remembered that Roxas had always been the more polite one, the one who listened, even at such a young age as when she had seen him last. 

She wondered where the real Roxas was, if his little corpse was rotting away in some ditch, if his killer or kidnapper or whatever had had the decency to at least bury him.

“I know what I said. You were children, and you wanted your friend to come back, I had to tell you he was going to,” Xion said, dismissing the thought and her own words with a wave. “Guess he's even more of an idiot than you are, uh?” 

“He's here for the Knight, though, not for us,” Thirteen whispered, Kairi felt the dejection roll against her like tidal waves.   
Goddammit, it hurt like _fuck_. 

She had never wanted to steal a friend from her own imaginary – imagined – friends. That was not cool.   
But maybe, since they were all a by-product of her own mind, it was also okay. She was stealing from herself, after all. No damage at all in that. 

“Knight,” Xion called her, her voice harsh like the tail of a whip. “Why don't you make yourself useful and go ask them their names? You know them, don't you?” 

“Yeah,” Kairi answered.  
She knew them. She knew the real them, the matrices from which the House, or her mind, had cut up these replacements.   
She knew them. 

“The buff one is Rook,” Sunshine supplied, pointing at his back, at the door that contained Kairi's non-friends. 

“Don't use their real names and don't let them use them either, am I clear?” Xion said, sending a warning glare in her direction.   
A shiver or two ran down Kairi's spine and she nodded almost eagerly. 

She didn't need an excuse to go talk to her friends.   
She didn't. 

*°*

“She's weird,” Naminé whispered.   
Riku had missed it, he didn't know when was the actual last time he had heard her whispering like this, but he had missed it terribly. 

“She's been here a while.”

And she was coming back to them.  
Riku could see her steps, approaching the corner of the room they had been banished to. 

Terra had yet to speak again, contenting himself to silence and half-solitude, standing in the most shadowed spot that he could find against the wall, and Riku was not going to bother him. Not yet. Not when he could see the gears turning in his brother's head, behind his closed off eyes. 

Gears of desperation, no doubt about that. Naminé could see it too, and Naminé was more or less a bitch when it came to Terra and his necessities. 

“We're not getting out any time soon, are we?” the girl asked him, or maybe not him, maybe she asked the walls and the floors, the Corner House, a great mass of whispering voices and stolen breaths and ripped off souls. 

“We're getting out,” he told her, gripping her hands tighter.   
He wondered if he was hurting her, but Naminé didn't make a sound, she just reciprocated with all the strength she had, and the half-moons she was leaving in his skin – red and stinging – were the only blessing Riku needed. 

“Guys,” Kairi spoke, closer now.   
Colorful Kairi, he had called her in his mind, more than once along the years he had known her. And it still stood, she was still dark and blood-red and the most mesmerizing of indigo.   
She was still Kairi, even if she was a bit weird, a bit detached, a bit changed. 

She was still his. 

He was still hers. He could see it in the way her eyes swept over him kindly, softly, as if a caress, as if she was in love.   
And she was. And he was too. 

Their love for each other had never been a secret. “I'm– You… You know how we can't use real names, right?” she stole a glance towards Terra. They all nodded, and waited. 

If Riku was to open his mouth now, the only thing coming out would be her name.   
Kairi. 

She had been the only real constant of his life. He had not gone one day without seeing her.   
She was the foundation of his life. 

“Yes,” Naminé answered for all of them. 

“Yeah, okay, good. I'm the Knight,” Kairi said, nodding along her own voice, “and he,” she pointed towards Terra, “is the Rook and this is starting to look like a chessboard so, please, choose something that is not chess-related.”

“Why, I wanted to call myself a Pawn, considering how you played us from the start to get us in here,” Naminé hissed. The thing was, Naminé had always been the best one a whispering. And when she was angry – like, real fucking angry, not just pissed as she usually was – her voice became a blade of ice. It could kill you in a second, sharp like any other newly-sharpened knife, but it never left a trace. 

Riku and Kairi had often joked that Naminé's furious whispering would have been the cause of their deaths, sooner or later, and judging from the pain hatched on Kairi's face, her death was coming a lot sooner than anticipated. 

“You really wanna talk about betrayal?” Kairi spat out, curling her hands up into fists.

“Grow up, Ka– Knight, I only spoke to your dad because I was fucking worried about you, okay?”

“Whatever,” Kairi snapped, the fight leaving her body a puddle of slumped shoulders, broken heart and aching head. 

Riku breathed hard at the easiness with which he could sill read his best friend. She was there. She was open to him like she had always been. She was still the same Kairi.  
Colorful and angry and beautiful. “Choose a name, I don't care. You're not even _real_.”

“Fuck you,” Naminé said, small and hurt and dejected. Kairi huffed under her breath. “No really, fuck you. We spent months looking for you and now you pull this shit? What if it's you that's not real? What if all you are is just a collective delusion we're having because we wanted to see you again so much?”

And, well, it wasn't that Riku hadn't thought about it. He had, he had extensively thought about it. It was possibly his greatest fear.   
But. Kairi was there. 

Kairi.   
Was.  
There.   
In front of them. Speaking to them.   
She was alive. 

He would have gladly taken a fake, alive and known Kairi instead of a dead one.   
Any time. Every day. He didn't even care anymore.

So he said, wrapping his fingers tighter around Naminé's fingers, “Shut up.” And then again, “Shut up. She's here. This is what we wanted.”

“You're a bad forgery, dude. The real thing doesn't talk like that,” Kairi told him, running around in circles to not say his name.   
Because… 

Because even if he wasn't the real Riku she didn't want to hurt him in any way. 

“Traumatic experiences do this to a person,” he said, shrugging.   
It was easy, talking to Kairi, reading into her every twitch, every expression, every minimal movement of her body.   
It was easy and it was the most difficult thing Riku had ever done, because she was there, but she was also _there_. In the Corner House.   
She had willingly left them. Left him. 

Alone. And with a broken oath on his hands, weighting on his shoulders, on his heart.   
She had willingly chosen to leave him, to get away. 

Forgiveness was probably the hardest thing to find and Riku didn't have the strength to go look for it anywhere. 

*

“Are still freaking out? Dude, your eyes are getting creepy, come on, talk to me. I promise I will not tell you you're not real.”

Riku didn't pretend to understand what was currently happening around him. He already knew he was losing time. It was scary, it was a symptom he should have not ignored, it was not something unexpected. 

How he had managed to go from talking to Kairi the Knight to standing in front of the boy who had called him Adelphos – the boy who had threatened Terra – he didn't know.   
He surely wouldn't have followed on his own volition. Not considering that this boy had threatened his brother. 

Right? 

Riku wasn't suicidal, after all. He was safe in thinking he had not followed willingly. 

“Hey, easy with that, Adelphos, breathe.” The boy was touching him, his bony hands were on Riku's shoulders, and they did not help at all.   
This boy wasn't Terra and he wasn't Naminé. He couldn't help. 

“Stop calling me that,” Riku spat out, and he noticed only in that moment that he actually was short of breath. He decided not to worry about it. 

“'Kay. Sorry. Have you chosen a name for yourself, yet? I'm Sunshine, by the way, I don't know if you got that the past four-hundred times I told you.” The boy chuckled, shrugging a little. Riku would have described it as self-consciously, but he knew himself well enough to know that he wasn't good at reading people he didn't have extensive knowledge of. 

“I know your name. You told me earlier. I think.”

“Okay, cool. Your name?” Riku only realized that minutes went by when the boy – Sunshine – started patting his shoulder a bit impatiently. “Dude, I have to call you something. If you don't like to be called Adelphos, at least give me– I don't know, something. Anything. Please.”

“I…” Riku stared. He knew he was staring. He spent some time focusing on himself and his own actions. That helped staying here. Staying focused. Or so he hoped. “I don't… I haven't found a name, yet.”

“Oh. Um, listen, I know you don't remember much, if anything, but you're my friend, okay? I need to be able to call you.”   
And Riku, Riku didn't have a problem to believe Sunshine's words. He looked so terribly uncomfortable, so anguished and agitated, like the simple fact that he couldn't call Riku anything at all was making him fall into panic.

His blue eyes were wide, his hands frantic as they swept the air like headless chickens.   
Were they really friends, anyway?

Considering the care and effort Riku put into his friends, he doubted he could forget one of them so easily.   
He had so few of them, he was supposed to cherish each and every one like precious treasures, wasn't he?   
But this boy, Sunshine, he had forgotten.   
Was he really such an important friend if Riku had forgotten him?

“Dude, _please_ ,” Sunshine repeated, a noticeable cry in his prayer. 

“I don't know. I don't know!” Riku snapped, the importance the boy was putting on his shoulders was viscous and disgusting. 

He wasn't someone anyone should want as a friend. He had let Kairi disappear, he had wasted too much time before trying to get her back.   
Naminé didn't even want to spend time with him anymore. 

He had forgotten Sunshine. 

He was not a good friend.   
He was barely even a good person. 

“Call me whatever. You choose.”

“No, it doesn't work like that. It might work for a while but… Are you– Hey.” Sunshine took a very deep breath, and he took his hands away from Riku's shoulders. “Are you okay? Have you been okay out there?”

*°*

The rush of bloods in her ears was making everything more confused, more incomprehensible.   
Kairi didn't understand her own mind on the good days, and this one definitely didn't make the cut. 

She supposed she was happy to see her friends.   
She should have been, of course. They were here, they had been looking for her. She should have just let herself believe it.   
She was sick, after all. This was not breaking news for anyone involved. 

She was sick. Her mind was sick. The best she could do was take all she could from it. She should have just shut her own thoughts up, let herself be happy. Let herself be complete. 

They had come, looking for her, finding her. They were here.   
They loved her. 

Why couldn't she just…   
Just take it. For once. 

Why did everything had to be dark and sad and awful to be real?   
Good things were real too, sometimes.   
And she could argue that the situation was not exactly a happy one, anyway.   
Not if she took into consideration that Riku was allegedly traumatized and that Naminé kept glaring at her. 

Oh God, couldn't she just stop that?  
Kairi snapped at her former – not former – girlfriend, “Stop looking at me.”

Naminé raised an eyebrow in a clear attempt to mock her irritation.   
Naminé was good at mocking Kairi's emotions. Had always been.  
Or maybe not. Maybe Kairi was just being angry and unfair. 

“This would be a good time to calm down,” Naminé told her. 

“Yeah? Well, this would be a good time to stop it with the condescension. Is this really what you had planned for our big, teary reunion?” 

“No.” Naminé smirked at her and loosened her hair from the tie it had been in. “I would have slapped you into next week. Sadly, all I got was an emotionally charged hug and you repeating that we are not real.” 

“Wow, really romantic, Miné. I'm swooning. Do you see me swooning?” Kairi clenched her fists and punched the wall at her back. She could do little else to make the anger go away, and even that barely helped at all.

Naminé was good at pissing her off, just as she had been good at calming her down. 

But no, the pacifying role had always been Riku's, really. He had been the glue keeping them all together. He had been the one who knew them enough to placate them.

“I see you losing control, Knight. You should really consider calming down,” Naminé repeated, Kairi's chosen name felt wrong on her lips, like mockery. Like another betrayal. 

Kairi didn't understand why, but it stabbed her heart and she was bleeding out. She was bleeding out and Naminé kept staring. Naminé didn't care.

“Who are you, my mother?” she chocked on her words, but no one pointed it out. How courteous of them. 

She could feel Terra's eyes boring holes into her nape, anyway. She didn't need him to open his mouth and pass along his judgment. 

“No. your mother is at home. Worrying sick about you. Hurting. All because you're such a piece of shit. Have you even spent one second thinking about her?”

“I almost missed your guilt tripping, Miné,” Kairi drawled. 

Of course she had known, in some remote part of her mind, that the reunion wouldn't have been all roses and happy feelings.   
Of course, this wasn't exactly the amount of bad blood she had been planning for.   
She had left things, with Naminé, a little bitter and a little sour. That happened often enough. They fought. They were irritable teenagers that sometimes managed to get on each other's nerves. 

But this…   
This sheer _loathing_ was something Kairi had never seen, let alone anticipate. 

“Well, have you? And stop saying my name.”

“Of course I have,” she murmured.   
The accusation in Naminé's words was just as plain as it was unfair.   
Kairi loved her mother. 

“You left all of us in pieces, Ka– Fuck.” Naminé punched the floor she was sitting on, tears falling from her wide open eyes, and she was not looking at Kairi and Kairi was glad of that.   
She wouldn't have been able to bear witness to the pain in her girlfriend's – her best friend's – face. “Fuck this place. I can't even have a serious conversation with you. I can't call you Knight in the middle of a breakdown!”

“I can't call you anything, I hope you realize. At least give me a name I can use,” Kairi mumbled. She didn't know why true names were forbidden in the Corner House. Off all things, she had thought this particular one was the least important. 

Now she kinda wanted to know, though. She wanted to know if using them was really so detrimental, so dangerous.   
She wanted to know if she had unwillingly caused even more damage to her (not)former girlfriend.


End file.
